PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Americans as I Saw Them 
At Home and Abroad 




PHILIP GIBBS 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Americans as 1 saw them 
at Home and Abroad 

hy 

Philip Gibbs 



Author uf 
"Now It Can Be Told" 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 






People of DESTi>ry 



Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published September, 1920 



SEF I" 1320 

g)CI,A576605 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 

I. The Adventure of Life in New York 

II. Some People I Met in America . . 

III. Things I Like in the United States 

IV. America's New Place in the World 

V. What England Thinks of America 

VI. Americans in Europe 



1 

35 

68 

98 

125 

160 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PHILIP GIBBS Frontispiece 

A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS Facing p. 42 
THE SOCIAL ATMOSPHERE OF AN AMERICAN 

POST-OFFICE ** 72 

I LIKED THE GREETING OF THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR ' * 96 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

I HAD the luck to go to New York for the 
first time when the ordinary Hfe of that 
City of Adventure — always so vital and 
dynamic in activity — was intensified by the 
emotion of historic days. The war was over, 
and the warriors were coming home with the 
triumph of victory as the reward of courage; 
but peace was still delayed and there had 
not yet crept over the spirits of the people 
the staleness and disillusionment that always 
follow the ending of war, when men say: 
*'What was the use of it, after all? Where 
are gratitude and justice? Who pays me for 
the loss of my leg?" . . . The emotion of New 
York life was visible in its streets. The city 
itself, monstrous, yet dreamlike and mystical 
as one sees it first rising to fantastic shapes 
through the haze of dawn above the waters 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

of the Hudson, seemed to be excited by its 
own historical significance. There was a vi- 
bration about it as sunHght splashed its gold 
upon the topmost stories of the skyscrapers 
and sparkled in the thousand windows of the 
Woolworth Tower and flung black bars of 
shadow across the lower blocks. Banners 
were flying everywhere in the streets that 
go straight and long between those perpen- 
dicular clitfs of masonry, and the wind that 
comes blowing up the two rivers ruffled 
them. They were banners of rejoicing, but 
reminders also of the service and sacrifice of 
each house from which they were hanging, 
with golden stars of death above the heads 
of the living crowds surging there below 
them. In those decorations of New York I 
saw the imagination of a people cotiscious of 
their own power, and with a dramatic in- 
stinct able to impress the multitudes with 
the glory and splendor of their achievement. 
It was the same sense of drama that is re- 
vealed commercially in the genius of adver- 
tisement which startled me when I first 
walked down Broadway, dazzled by moving 
pictures of light, by flashing signs that 
shouted to me from high heaven to buy 
chewing-gum and to go on chewung; and 

2 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

squirming, wriggling, revolving snakes of 
changing color that burned letters of fire 
into my brain, so that even now in remem- 
brance my eyes are scorched with the imprint 
of a monstrous kitten unrolling an endless 
reel of cotton. The "Welcome Home" of 
American troops was an advertisement of 
American manhood, idealized by emotion; 
and it was designed, surely, by an artist 
whose imagination had been touched by the 
audacity of the master-builders of New York 
who climb to the sky with their houses. I 
think it was inspired also by the vision of 
the moving-picture kings who resurrect the 
gorgeous life of Babylon, and re-establish 
the court of Cleopatra, for Theda Bara, the 
"Movie Queen." When the men of the 
Twenty-seventh Division of New York came 
marching home down Fifth Avenue they 
passed through triumphal arches of white 
plaster that seemed solid enough to last for 
centuries, though they had grown high, like 
Jack's beanstalk, in a single night; and the 
troops glanced sideways at a vast display of 
Indian trophies with tattered colors like 
those of sunburnt wigwams where the spears 
of the "braves" were piled above the shields 

of fallen warriors. 

s 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

"Like an undergraduate's cozy corner," 
said an unkind wit, and New York laughed, 
but liked the symboHsm of those shields and 
went on with astonished eyes to gaze at the 
masterpiece of Chalfin, the designer of it all, 
which was a necklace like a net of precious 
jewels, suspended, between two white pillars 
surmounted by stars, across the Avenue. 
At night strong searchlights played upon this 
necklace, and at the end of those bars of 
white radiance, shot through the darkness, 
the hanging jewels swayed and glittered with 
a thousand delicate colors like diamonds, 
rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Night after 
night, as I drove down Fifth Avenue, I 
turned in the car to look back at the aston- 
ishing picture of that triumphal archway, and 
saw how the long tide of cars behind was 
caught by the searchlights so that all their 
metal was like burnished gold and silver; 
and how the faces of dense crowds staring up 
at the suspended necklace were all white — 
dead-white as Pierrot's; and how the sky 
above New York and the tall clifFlike masses 
of masonry on each side of Fifth Avenue 
were fingered by the outer radiance of the 
brightness that was blinding in the heart of 
the city. To me, a stranger in New York, 

4 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

unused to the height of its buildings and to 
the rush of traffic in its streets, these illumi- 
nations of victory were the crowning touch of 
fantasy, and I seemed to be in a dream of 
some City of the Future, among people of a 
new civilization, strange and wonderful. 
The soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Division 
were not overcome by emotion at this dis- 
play in their honor. "That's all right," 
they said, grinning at the cheering crowds, 
"and when do we eat.^" Those words re- 
minded me of Tommy Atkins, who would go 
through the hanging-gardens of Babylon it- 
self — if the time-machine were switched 
back — with the same shrewd humor. 

The adventure of life in New York, al- 
ways startling and exciting, I am certain, to 
a man or woman who enters its swirl as a 
stranger, was more stirring at the time of my 
first visit because of this eddying influence 
of war's back-wash. The city was over- 
crowded with visitors from all parts of the 
United States who had come in to meet their 
home-coming soldiers, and having met them 
stayed awhile to give these boys a good time 
after their exile. This floating population 
of New York flowed into all the hotels and 
restaurants and theaters. Two new hotels— 

5 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the Commodore and the Pennsylvania — were 
opened just before I came, and, with two 
thousand bedrooms each, had no room to 
spare, and did not reduce the population of 
the Plaza, Vanderbilt, Manhattan, Biltmore, 
or Ritz-Carlton. I watched the social life in 
those palaces and found it more entertaining 
than the most sensational "movie" with a 
continuous performance. The architects of 
those American hotels have vied with one 
another in creating an atmosphere of richness 
and luxury. They have been prodigal in the 
use of marble pillars and balustrades, more 
magnificent than Roman. They have gone 
to the extreme limit of taste in gilding the 
paneled walls and ceilings from which they 
have suspended enormous candelabra like 
those in the palace of Versailles. I lost my- 
self in the vastness of tea-rooms and lounges, 
and when invited to a banquet found it 
necessary to bring my ticket, because often 
there are a dozen banquets in progress in one 
hotel, and there is a banqueting-room on 
every floor. When I passed up in the ele- 
vator of one hotel I saw the different crowds 
in the corridors surging toward those great 
lighted rooms where the tables were spread 
with flowers, and from which came gusts of 

6 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

"jazz" music or the opening bars of "The 
Star-spangled Banner." 

In all the dining-rooms there rises the 
gusty noise of many conversations above the 
music of an orchestra determined to be heard, 
and between the bars of a Leslie Stuart 
waltz, or on the last beat of the "Humoreske," 
a colored waiter says, "Chicken okra, sah?" 
or "Clam chow^der?" and one hears the 
laughing words of a girl who asks, "Do you 
mind if I powder my nose?" and does so with 
a glance at a little gold mirror and a dab 
from a little gold box. The vastness, and 
the overwhelming luxury, of the New York 
hotels was my first and strongest impres- 
sion in this city, after I had recovered 
from the sensation of the high fantastic 
buildings; but it occurred to me very 
quickly that this luxury of architecture and 
decoration has no close reference to the life 
of the people. They are only visitors in la 
vie de luxe — and do not belong to it, and do 
not let it enter into their souls or bodies. 
In a wealthier, more expansive way, they are 
like the city clerks and their girls in London 
who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble 
halls at Lyon's Popular Cafe and sit around 
a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it won- 

2 7 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

derful . . . and shall we go home by tram?" 
There are many rich people in New York — 
more, I suppose, than in any other city of the 
world — but, apart from cosmopolitan men 
and women who have luxury beneath their 
skins, there is no innate sense of it in the 
social life of these people. In the hotel 
palaces, as well as in the private mansions 
along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all 
their outward splendor does not alter the 
simplicity and honesty of their character. 
They remain essentially "middle-class" and 
have none of the easy licentiousness of that 
European aristocracy which, before the war, 
flaunted its wealth and its vice in Paris, 
Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts 
where the cocottes of the world assembled to 
barter their beauty, and where idle men went 
from boredom to boredom in search of subtle 
forms of pleasure. American women of 
wealth spend vast sums of money on dress, 
and there is the glitter of diamonds at many 
dinner-tables, but most of them have too 
much shrewdness of humor to play the 
"vamp," and the social code to which they 
belong is swept clean by common sense. 
"My dear," said an American hostess who 
belongs to one of the old rich families of 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

New York, *' forgive me for wearing my dia- 
monds to-night. It must shock you, coming 
from scenes of ruin and desolation." This 
dowager duchess of New York, as I like to 
think of her, wore her diamonds as the mayor 
of a provincial town in England wears his 
chain of office, but as she sat at the head of 
her table in one of the big mansions of New 
York I saw that wealth had not cumbered the 
soul of this masterful lady, whose views on 
life are as direct and simple as those of 
Abraham Lincoln. She was the middle-class 
housewife in spite of the footmen who stood 
in fear of her. 

Essentially middle-class in the best sense 
of the word were the crowds I met in the 
hotels. The men were making money— lots 
of it — ^by hard work. They had taken a few 
days off, or left business early, to meet their 
soldier-sons in these gilded halls where they 
had a sense of satisfaction in spending large 
numbers of dollars in a short time. 

"This is my boy from 'over there'! Just 
come back." 

I heard that introduction many times, and 
saw the look of pride behind the glasses that 
were worn by a gray -eyed man, who had his 
hand on the arm of an upstanding fellow in 

9 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

field uniform, tall and lean and hard. "It's 
good to be back," said one of these young 
officers, and as he sat at table he looked round 
the huge salon with its cut-glass candelabra, 
where scores of little dinner-parties were in 
progress to the strident music of a stringed 
band, and then, with a queer little smile 
about his lips, as though thinking of the 
contrast between this scene and "over there," 
said, "Darned good!" In their evening 
frocks the women were elegant — they know 
how to dress at night — and now and then the 
fresh, frank beauty of one of these American 
girls startled my eyes by its witchery of 
youth and health. Some of them are decol- 
lete to the ultimate limit of a milliner's au- 
dacity, and foolishly I suffered from a sense 
of confusion sometimes because of the phys- 
ical revelations of elderly ladies whose virtue, 
I am sure, is as that of Caesar's wife. The 
frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of 
life's enchanted places would en\'y some 
of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, 
and scream with horror at their prices. 
But although the American woman with a 
wealthy husband likes to put on the flimsy 
robes of Circe, it is only as she would go to 
a fancy-dress ball in a frock that would make 

10 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

her brother say: "Gee! . . . And where did 
you get that bit of fluff?" She is Circe, 
with the Suffrage, and high ideals of Hfe, and 
strong views on the League of Nations. She 
makes up her face Hke a French comedienne, 
but she has, nine times out of ten, the kind 
heart of a parson's wife in rural England and 
a frank, good-natured wit which faces the 
realities of life with the candor of a clean 
mind. 

I found "gay life" in New York immensely 
and soberly respectable. One could take 
one's maiden aunt into the heart of it and 
not get hot by her blushes. In fact, it is the 
American maiden aunt who sets the pace of 
the fox-trot and the one-step in dancing- 
rooms where there are music and afternoon 
tea. Several times I supped "English break- 
fast tea" — I suspect Sir Thomas Lipton had 
something to do with it — at five o'clock on 
bright afternoons, watching the scene at 
Sherry's and Delmonico's. It seemed to me 
that this dancing habit was a most curious 
and over-rated form of social pleasure. It 
was as though American society had said, 
"Let us be devilishly gay!" but started too 
early in the day, with desperate sobriety. 
Many couples left the tea-table for the pol- 

11 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

islied boards and joined the throng which 
surged and eddied in circles of narrow circum- 
ference, jostled by other dancers. Youth 
did not have it all its own way. On the 
contrary, I noticed that bald-headed gentle- 
men with some width of waistbands were in 
the majority, dancing with pridigious gravity 
and the maiden aunts. They were mostly 
visitors, I am told, from other cities — Bosto- 
nians escaping from the restrictions of their 
Early Victorian atmosphere, senators who 
voted for prohibition in their own states, 
business men who had booked reservations 
on midnight trains from Grand Central 
Terminal. Here and there young officers of 
the army and navy led out pretty girls, and 
with linked arms, and faces very close to- 
gether, danced in a kind of coma, which they 
seemed to enjoy, though without any sparkle 
in their eyes. There were also officers of 
other nations — a young Frenchman appealing 
to the great heart of the American people on 
behalf of devastated France, and dancing 
for the sake of people scorched by the horrors 
of war, to say nothing of the little American 
girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de 
Guerre; and young English officers belong- 
ing to the British Mission, and engaged 

12 



THE AD\T5NTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

in propaganda — oh, frightful word! — of 
which a the dansant at Delmonico's v/as, no 
doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure 
that caught my eye gave the keynote to the 
moral and spiritual character of the scene. 
It was the figure of a stout old lady wearing 
a hat with a huge feather which waggled over 
her nose as she danced the one-step with 
earnest vivacity, and an old gentleman with 
side-whiskers. She panted as she came back 
to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes 
me feel young!" It occurred to me that she 
might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch 
on a visit to New York, and anyhow her 
presence assured me that afternoon dancing 
at Delmonico's need not form the theme of 
any moralist in search of vice in high places. 
It is not only respectable, it is domestic. 
Savonarola himself would not have de- 
nounced such innocent amusement. Nor 
did I find anything to shock the sensibilities 
of high-souled ethics in such midnight haunts 
as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden, 
except the inanity of all such shows where 
large numbers of pretty girls and others 
disport themselves in flowing draperies and 
colored lights before groups of tired people 
who can hardly hide their boredom, but 

13 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

yawn laughingly over their cocktails and say, 
"Isn't she wonderful?" when Mollle King 
sings a song about a variety of smiles, and 
discuss the personality of President Wilson 
between comic turns of the Dooley brothers. 
That at least is what happened in my little 
group on the roof of the Century Theater, 
where a manufacturer of barbed wire — I 
wonder if they were his barbs on which I tore 
myself In Flanders fields — initiated me Into 
the mystery of a Bacardi cocktail followed by 
a stinger, from which I was rescued, in the 
nick of time, by a kind lady on my right who 
took pity on my Innocence. A famous play- 
wright opposite, as sober as a judge, as 
courteous as Beau Brummell, passed the 
time of day, which was a wee small hour of 
morning, with little ladles who came into the 
limelight, until suddenly he said, with a sigh 
of infinite impatience, "Haven't we enjoyed 
ourselves enough? I want my bed"; so 
interrupting a serious discussion between a 
war correspondent and a cartoonist on the 
exact truth about German atrocities, to the 
monstrous melody of a jazz band. Human 
nature is the same in New York as In other 
cities of the world. Passion, weakness, folly, 
are not eliminated from the relations be- 

14 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

tween American men and women. But to 
find vice and decadence in American society 
one has to go in search of it; and I did not 
go. I found New York society tolerant in 
its views, frank in its expression of opinion, 
fond of laughter, and wonderfully sincere. 
Wealth does not spoil its fresh and healthy 
outlook on life, and its people are idealists at 
heart, with a reverence for the old-fashioned 
virtues and an admiration for those who 
"make good" in whatever job to which they 
put their hands. 

After all, hotel life, and restaurant life, 
and the glamorous world of the Great White 
Way, do not reveal the real soul of New 
York. They are no more a revelation of 
normal existence than boulevard life in 
Paris represents the daily round of the aver- 
age Parisian. They are the happy hunting- 
grounds of the transient, and the real New- 
Yorker only visits them in hours of leisure 
and boredom. 

Another side of the adventure of life in 
New York is "downtown," where the sub- 
ways and the overhead railways pour out 
tides of humanity who do not earn their 
dollars without hard work and long hours of 
it. I should never have found my way to 

15 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Bowling Green and Wall Street without a 
guide, because the underground world of the 
subways, where electric trains go rushing 
like shuttles through the warp and woof of a 
monstrous network, is utterly confusing to a 
stranger. But with the guide, who led me 
by the hand and laughed at my childlike 
bewilderment, I came into the heart of New 
York business life and saw its types in their 
natural environment. It is an alarming 
world to the wanderer who comes there sud- 
denly. I confess that when I first walked 
through those deep gorges, between the 
mighty walls of houses as high as mountains 
in a surge of humanity in a hurry, I felt dazed 
and cowardly. I had a conviction that my 
nerve-power would never survive the stress 
and strain of such a life in such a place. I 
nearly dislocated my neck by gazing up at 
the heights of the skyscrapers, rising story 
on story to fifty or sixty floors. In a House 
of a Thousand Windows I took the elevator 
to the top story and wished I hadn't when 
the girl in charge of the lift asked, "What 
floor?" and was answ^ered by a quiet gentle- 
man who said, "Thirty -one." That was 
our first stop, and in the few seconds we 
took to reach this altitude I had a vision of 

IG 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

this vast human ant-heap, with scores of 
offices on each floor, and typewriters cHcking 
in all of them, and girl-clerks taking down 
letters from hard-faced young men juggling 
with figures which, by the rise or drop of a 
decimal point, mean the difference between 
millions of dollars in the markets of the 
world. Each man and woman there in this 
House of a Thousand Windows had a human 
soul, with its own little drama of life, its 
loves and hopes and illusions, but in the 
vastness of one skyscraper, in the whirlpool 
of commerce, in the machinery of money- 
making, the humanities of life seemed to be 
destroyed and these people to be no more 
than slaves of modern civilization, ruthless of 
their individual happiness. What could they 
know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools 
of thought? . . . Out in Wall Street there 
was pandemonium. The outside brokers — 
the curb men — were bidding against one 
another for stocks not quoted on the New 
York Exchange — the Standard Oil Com- 
pany among them — and their hoarse cries 
mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood out- 
side a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely 
it was a madhouse, surrounded by other 
homes for incurably insane! This particular 

17 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

house was a narrow, not very tall, building 
of reddish brown brick, like a Georgian house 
in London, and out of each window, which 
was barred, poked two rows of faces, one 
above the other, as though the room inside 
were divided by a false floor. In the small 
window-frames sat single figures, in crouched 
positions, with telephone receivers on their 
ears and their faces staring at the crowd in 
the street below. Each one of those human 
faces, belonging to young men of healthy 
appearance, was making most hideous gri- 
maces, and each grimace was accompanied 
by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the 
man's fingers. With a thumb and two fin- 
gers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked 
through the windows with violent efforts to 
attract the notice of individuals in the street. 
I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had some 
hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I 
had first taken them to be were signaling 
messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps 
of different colors in order to be distinguished 
from their fellows. Up and down the street, 
and from the topmost as well as from the 
lower stories of many buildings, I saw the 
grimaces and the gestures of the window- 
men, and the noise and tumult in the street 

18 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

became more furious. It was a lively day in 
Wall Street, and I thanked God that my 
fate had not led me into such a life. It 
seemed worse than war. . . . 

Not really so, after all. It was only the 
outward appearance of things that distressed 
one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all 
these young men on the curb seemed very 
cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves 
as much as boys in a Rugby *' scrum." 
There was nothing wrong with their nerves. 
There was nothing wrong with a crowd of 
young business men and women with whom 
I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called 
Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. 
These were the working-bees of the great 
hive which is New York. They were in the 
front-line trenches of the struggle for ex- 
istence, and they seemed as cheerful as our 
fighting-men who were always less gloomy 
than the fellows at the rear in the safe 
back-waters of war. Business men and lady- 
clerks, typists, and secretaries, were all 
mingled at the little tables where the backs 
of chairs touched, and there was a loud, in- 
cessant chatter like the noise of a parrot- 
house. I overheard some fragments of con- 
versation at the tables close to me. 

19 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

*'Tliey don't seem to be getting on with 
the Peace Conference," said a young man 
with large spectacles. "All the little nations 
are trying to grab a bit of their neighbors' 
ground." 

"I saw the cutest little hat — " said a girl 
whose third finger was stained with red ink. 

"Have you seen that play by Maeter- 
linck.'^" asked an elderly man so like Presi- 
dent Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be 
the twin brother of that much-discussed 
man. 

These people were human all through, not 
at all dehumanized, after all, because they 
lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a 
New York skyscraper. I dare say also that 
their work is not so strenuous as it looks 
from the outside, and that they earn more 
dollars a week than business men and women 
of their own class in England, so that they 
have more margin for the pleasures of life, 
for the purchase of a "cute little hat," even 
for a play by Maeterlinck. 

After business hours many of these people 
hurry away from New Y^ork to suburbs, 
where they get quickly beyond the turmoil 
of the city in places with bustling little high 
streets of their own and good shops and, on 

20 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden 
framework, in gardens where flowers grow 
between great rocks which crop out of the 
soil along the Connecticut shore. They are 
the "commuters," or, as we should say in 
England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I 
did some "commuting" myself during a ten 
weeks' visit to America, I used to see them 
make a dash for their trains between five and 
six in the afternoon or late at night after 
theater-going in New York. I never tired 
of the sight of those crowds in the great hall 
of the Grand Central Terminal or in the 
Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very 
spirit of the United States in those vast 
buildings which typify modern progress. In 
England a railway station is, as a rule, the 
ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; 
but in America it is, even in provincial towns, 
a great adventure in architecture, where the 
mind is uplifted by nobility of design and 
imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, 
color, and silence. It is strangely, uncan- 
nily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsyl- 
vania Station, as one comes down a long 
broad flight of steps to the vast floor space 
below a high dome — painted blue like a 
summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling — 

21 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

uplifted on enoj'mous arches. It is like 
entering a great cathedral, and, though hun- 
dreds of people are scurrying about, there is a 
hush through the hall because of its immense 
height, in which all sound is lost, and there is 
no noise of footsteps and only a low murmur 
of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central 
Terminal, where I found myself many times 
before the last train left. There is no sign 
of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of 
sidings and sheds. All that is hidden away 
until one is admitted to the tracks before the 
trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls 
and flower-stalls bright with color, and book- 
stalls piled high with current literature from 
which every mind can take its choice, and 
candy-stalls where the aching jaw may find 
its chewing-gum, and link up meditation 
with mastication, on the way to New Ro- 
chelle — "forty-five minutes from Broadway" 
— or to the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, 
and Port Chester, this side of high life in 
Greenwich, Connecticut. 

Some of the male commuters have a habit 
of playing cards between New York and New 
Rochelle, showing an activity of mind not 
dulled by their day's work in town. But 
others indulge in conversational quartets, 

22 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

and on these journeys I heard more than I 
wanted to know about the private life of 
President Wilson, and things I wanted to 
learn about the experiences of American sol- 
diers in France, the state of feeling between 
America and England, and the philosophy of 
success by men who had succeeded. It was 
a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by 
will-power and a fighting spirit. *' Don't hit 
often," said one of these philosophers, who 
began life as an errand-boy and now designs 
the neckwear of society, "but, when you do, 
hit hard and clean. No man is worth his 
salt unless he loses his temper at the right 
time." 

In the last train to Greenwich were Ameri- 
can soldiers and mariners just back from 
France, who slept in corners of the smoking- 
coach and wakened with a start at New Ro- 
chelle, with a dazed look in their eyes, as 
though wondering whether they had merely 
dreamed of being home again and were still 
in the glades of the Argonne forest. . . . The 
powder was patchy on the nose of a tired 
lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a 
man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted 
cigar and thinking, with a little smile about 
his lips, of something that had happened in 

3 23 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the evening. Two typist-girls with their 
mothers had been to a lecture by Captain 
Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zee- 
brugge. They were "crazy" about him. 
They loved his description of the "blunt 
end" and the "pointed end" of the ship. 
They had absorbed a lot of knowledge about 
naval tactics; and they were going to buy 
his photograph to put over their desks. . . . 
Part of the adventure of life in New York 
is the acquisition of unexpected knowledge 
by means of lectures; and Carnegie Hall is 
the Mecca of lecturers. Having been one of 
the lecturers, I can speak from personal ex- 
perience when I say that a man who stands 
for the first time on the naked desert of that 
platform, looking toward rows of white faces 
and white shirt-fronts to the farthest limit of 
the topmost galleries, feels humility creep 
into his soul until he shrinks to the size of 
Hop-o'-My -Thumb and is the smallest, lone- 
liest thing in the whole wide world. A mi- 
crobe is a monster to him, and he quakes with 
terror when he hears the first squeak of his 
tiny voice in the vast spaciousness under 
that high, vaulted roof. On that first night 
of mine I would have sold myself, with white 
shirt, cuff-links, and quaking body, for a 

24 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

two-cent piece, if any one had been fool 
enough to buy me and let me off that awful 
ordeal. And yet, looking back on it now, I 
know that it was the finest hour of my life, 
and a w^onderful reward for small service, 
when all those people rose to greet me, and 
there came up to me out of that audience a 
spiritual friendship so warm and generous 
that I felt it like the touch of kindly hands 
about me, and recovered from my fright. 
Afterward, as always happens in America, 
there w^as a procession of people who came 
onto the platform to shake hands and say 
words of thanks, so that one gets into actual 
touch with all kinds of people and their 
friendship becomes personal. In that way 
I made thousands of friends in America and 
feel toward them all a lasting gratitude be- 
cause of the generous, warm-hearted, splen- 
did things they said as they passed with a 
quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in 
America is deep-rooted and widespread. 
Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is 
in competition with every other town near 
by for lecturers who have some special fame 
or knowledge. In New York there is an 
endless series of lectures, not only in places 
like Carnegie Hall and ^Eolian Hall, but in 

i5 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

clubs and churches. Great audiences, made 
up of rich society people as well as the 
"intellectuals" and the professional classes, 
gather in force to hear any man whose per- 
sonality makes him interesting or who has 
something to say which they want to hear. 
In many cases personality is sufficient. 
People of New York will cheerfully pay five 
dollars to see a famous man, and not think 
their money wasted if his words are lost in 
empty space, or if they know already as 
much as he can tell them about the subject 
of his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need 
to prepare orations. When he said, ^'Mes- 
sieurs et mesdames,^' they cheered him for ten 
minutes, and when, after that, he said, ^'je 
suis enchante,^^ they cheered him for ten 
minutes more. They like to see the men 
who have done things, the men who count 
for something, and to study the personality 
of a man about whom they have read. If he 
has something to tell them, so much the 
better, and if he is not renowned he must tell 
them something pretty good if he wants 
their money and their patience. I have no 
doubt that the habit of lecture-going is one 
of the greatest influences at work in the edu- 
cation of the American people. The knowl- 

26 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

edge they acquire in this way does not bite 
very deep, and it leaves, I fancy, only a 
superficial impression, but it awakens their 
intelligence and imagination, directs their 
thoughts to some of the big problems of 
life, and is a better way of spending an 
evening than idle gossip or a variety enter- 
tainment. The League for Political Educa- 
tion which I had the honor of addressing in 
Carnegie Hall has a series of lectures — three 
times a week, I think — which are attended 
by people engaged in every kind of educative 
and social work in New York, and at a 
luncheon afterward I listened to a number of 
speeches by public men and women more in- 
spiring in their sincerity of idealism than 
anything I have heard in similar assemblies. 
All these people were engaged in practical 
work for the welfare of their fellow-creatures, 
as pioneers of progress in the adventure of 
life in New York, and the women especially, 
like Jane Addams, impressed me by the real 
beauty of their personality. 

Another phase of life which interested me 
was the club world of the city, and in these 
clubs I met most of the men and many of the 
women who count in the intellectual activity 
of New Y^ork. I came in touch there with 

27 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

every stratum of thought and tradition 
which makes up the structure of American 
politics and ideas. I met the conservatives 
of the Union Club who live in an atmosphere 
of dignified austerity (reminding me of the 
Athenaeum Club in London, where the very 
waiters have the air of bishops and the po- 
litical philosophy of the late Lord Salisbury), 
and who confided to me with quiet gravity 
their personal and unprintable opinions of 
Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member 
of the Union League Club, hardly less con- 
servative in its traditional outlook and having 
a membership which includes many leading 
business and professional men of New York 
City. It was here that I saw a touching 
ceremony which is one of my best memories 
of the United States, when the negro troops 
of a fighting regiment marched up Fifth 
Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back their 
colors for safe-keeping to the Union League 
Club, which had presented them when they 
went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speak- 
ing from the balcony, praised them for their 
valor in the great conflict for the world's 
liberty, when they fought for the country 
which had given them their own freedom by 
no light sacrifice of blood. By their service 

28 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

in France they had gamed a glory for their 
citizenship in the United States and stood 
equal with their white comrades in the grati- 
tude of the American people. There were 
tears in the eyes of colored officers when, 
after a luncheon in the Union League Club, 
they heard other words like those, giving 
honor to the spirit of their race. . . . Up the 
wide stairway of the club, in the softly 
glowing light which comes through a stained- 
glass window, the colors of the darky regi- 
ment hang as a memorial of courage and 
sacrifice. . . . 

I was the guest of the Arts Club amid a 
crowd of painters, poets, musicians, and 
writing-men, who sat at long tables in pan- 
eled rooms decorated with pictures and cari- 
catures w^hich were the work of their own 
members. Clouds of tobacco smoke made 
wreaths above the board, A soldier-poet 
rose between the courses and sang his own 
songs to the chorus of his comrades. It was 
a jolly night among jolly good fellows, who 
had wit, and the gift of laughter, and large 
hearts which beat in sympathy for those who 
suffered in the war. ... In the City Club I 
had a room when I wanted it, and the hall 
porter and the bell-boys, and the elevator- 

29 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands 
with me when I went in and out, so that I 
felt at home there, after a splendid night 
when crowds of ladies joined the men to 
listen to my story of the war, and when a 
famous glee-party sang songs to me across 
rose garlands on the banquet table. The 
City Club has a number of habitues who play 
dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather 
chairs discuss the destiny of nations as men 
who pull the wires which make the puppets 
dance. It is the home of the foreign cor- 
respondents in New York, who know the 
inside of international politics, and whose 
president is (or was, at the time of my visit) 
a kindly, human, English soul with a genius 
for fellowship which has made a little League 
of Nations in this New York house. I met 
him first, as a comrade of the pen, in the 
Street of Adventure, where London jour- 
nalists rub shoulders on their wa}^ to history; 
and in New York his friendship was a gener- 
ous and helpful gift, and by his good words I 
made many other friends. 

It seemed to me that New York is a city 
where friendship is quickly made, and I 
found that the best part of my adventure in 
the city. Day after day, when dusk was 

30 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

creeping into the streets and lights began to 
gleam in all the windows of the houses that 
reach up to the stars, I drove down the long 
highway of Fifth Avenue with a certainty 
that before the evening was out I should 
meet a number of friendly souls who would 
make me welcome at their tables and reveal 
their convictions and ideals with a candor 
which does not come to English people 
until their ice of reserve is broken or thawed. 
And that was always so. At a small dinner- 
party or a big reception, in one of the great 
mansions of New York, or in a suite of rooms 
high above the traffic of the street, conver- 
sation was free-and-easy, with or without the 
aid of a cocktail, and laughter came in gusts, 
and American men and women spoke of the 
realities of life frankly and without camou- 
flage, with a directness and sincerity that 
touched the essential truth of things. In 
one room Melba sang with eternal girlhood 
in her voice, while painters and diplomats, 
novelists, and wits, famous actresses and 
princesses of New York, were hushed into 
silence for a while, until, when the spell was 
broken, there rose again a merry tumult of 
tongues. In another room a group of "in- 
tellectuals," tired of talking about war and 

31 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

peace, played charades like children in the 
nursery, and sat down to drawing games 
with shouts of mirth at a woman's head with 
the body of a fish and the legs of a bird. In 
another house the King's Jester of New York, 
who goes from party to party like a French 
wit — the little Abbe Morellet — in the salons 
of France before the Revolution, destroyed 
the dignity of decorous people by a carica- 
ture of German opera and an imitation of a 
German husband eating in a public restau- 
rant. I knew the weakness that comes from 
a surfeit of laughter. ... I did not tire of 
these social adventures in New York, and I 
came to see something of the spirit of the 
people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan 
city. I found that spirit touched, in spite of 
social merriment, by the tragedy of war, and 
anxious about the outcome of peace. I found 
these people conscious of new responsibilities 
thrust upon them by fate, and groping in 
their minds for some guidance, for some clear 
light upon their duty and destiny in the re- 
shaping of the world by the history that has 
happened. Europe, three thousand miles 
away, is still a mystery to them, full of un- 
known forces and peoples and passions which 
they cannot understand, though they read 

3« 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 

all their Sunday papers, with all their bulky- 
supplements. When I went among them 
they were divided by the conflict of political 
differences with passionate emotion, and torn 
between conflicting ideals of patriotism and 
humanity. But most of them put on one 
side, with a fine disdain, all meanness of 
thought and action and the dirty squalor of 
financial interests. Sure of their power 
among nations, the people I met — and I met 
many of the best — were anxious to rise to 
their high chance in history and to do the 
Big Thing in a big way, when they saw the 
straight road ahead. 

When I left New York they were raising 
their fifth great Victory Loan, and the streets 
were draped in banners bearing the great V 
for Victory and for the number of the loan. 
Their sense of drama was at work again to 
make this enterprise successful, and their 
genius of advertisement was in action to put 
a spell upon the people. The face of a 
farmer was on the posters in many streets, 
and that sturdy old fellow upon whose indus- 
try the wealth of America depends so much, 
because it is founded in the soil, put his hand 
in his pocket and said, "Sure, we'll see it 
through!" 

33 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

From my brief visit one conviction came 
to me. It is that whatever line of action the 
American people take in the new world that 
is now being born out of the tumult of war, 
they will see it through, by any sacrifice and 
at any cost. 



n 

SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

AS a professional onlooker of life (and it is 
L a poor profession, as I must admit) it 
has always been my habit to study national 
and social types in any country where I 
happen to be. I find an untiring interest in 
this, and prefer to sit in a French cafe, for 
example, watching the people who come in 
and out, and hearing scraps of conversation 
that pass across the table, to the most thrill- 
ing theatrical entertainment. And I find 
more interest in "common" people than in 
the uncommonly distinguished, by fame and 
power. To me the types in a London omni- 
bus or a suburban train are more absorbing 
as a study than a group of generals or a 
party of statesmen, and I like to discover the 
lives of the world's nobodies, their way of 
thought and their outlook on the world, by 
the character in their faces and their little 
social habits. In that way one gets a sense 
of the social drama of a country and of the 

35 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

national ideals and purpose. So when I went 
to the United States after four and a half 
years in the war zone, where I had been 
watching another kind of drama, hideous 
and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell 
into my old habit of searching for types and 
studying characters. I had unusual oppor- 
tunity. New York and many other cities 
opened their hearts and their houses to me 
in a most generous way, and I met great 
numbers of people of every class and kind. 
The first people I met, before 1 had stepped 
off my ship of adventure, were young news- 
paper men who searched the ship like a sieve 
for any passenger who had something in his 
life or brain worth telling to the world. I 
was scared of them, having heard that they 
could extract the very secrets of one's soul 
by examination of the third degree; but I 
found them human and friendly fellows who 
greeted me cheerily and did not take up 
much time when they set me up like a lay- 
figure on the boat deck, turned on the 
"movie "-machine, snap-shotted me from 
various angles, and offered me American 
cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met 
many other newspaper men and women in 
the United States; those who control the 

36 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

power of the press — the masters of the ma- 
chine which shapes the mind of peoples — 
and those who feed its wheels with words. 
Because I had some history to tell, the word- 
writers lay in wait for me, found my tele- 
phone number in any hotel of any town 
before I knew it myself, tapped at my bed- 
room door w^hen I was in the transition 
stage between day and evening clothes, and 
asked questions about many things of which 
I knew nothing at all, so that I had to camou- 
flage my abysmal depths of ignorance. 

They know their job, those American re- 
porters, and I was impressed especially by 
the young women. There was one girl who 
sat squarely in front of me, fixed me with 
candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me 
through an examination about my sad past 
until I had revealed everything. There is 
nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and 
I should blush to meet her again. She did 
not take a single note — by that I knew her 
as a good journalist — and wrote two columns 
of revelation with most deadly accuracy and 
a beautiful style. Another girl followed me 
round a picture-gallery listening to casual 
remarks among a group of friends, and wrote 
an article on art-criticism which left me 

37 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

breathless with admiration at her wit and 
knowledge, of which I took the credit. One 
young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Ox- 
ford, boarded the train at New York, bought 
me a drawing-room for private conversa- 
tion, and by the time we reached Phila- 
delphia made it entirely futile for me to give 
a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, 
and wrote the entire history of everything I 
had seen and thought through years of war, 
in next day's paper. I liked a young Har- 
vard man who came to see me in Boston. 
He had a modesty and a winning manner 
which made me rack my brains to tell him 
something good, and I admired his type, so 
clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. 
He belonged to the stuff of young America, 
as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for 
service whatever the risk. I met the edi- 
torial staffs of many newspapers, and was 
given a luncheon by the proprietor and edi- 
tors of one great newspaper in New York 
which is perhaps the biggest power in the 
United States to-day. All the men round 
me were literary types, and I saw in their 
faces the imprint of hard thought, and of 
hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than 
in the newspaper life of any other coimtry 

38 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

of the world. They all had an absorbing 
interest in the international situation after 
the armistice, and knew a good deal about 
the secret workings of European policy. A 
young correspondent just back from Russia 
made a speech summing up his experiences 
and conclusions, which were of a startling 
kind, told with the utmost simplicity and 
bluntness. The proprietor took me into his 
private room, and outlined his general policy 
on world affairs, of which the first item on 
his program was friendship with England. . . . 
I found among newspaper men a sense of 
responsibility with which they are not gener- 
ally credited, and wonderfully alert and open 
minds; also, apart from their own party 
politics and prejudices, a desire for fair play 
and truth. The Yellow Press still has its 
power, and it is a malign influence in the 
United States, but the newspapers of good 
repute are conducted by men of principle 
and conviction, and their editorial and 
literary staffs have a high level of talent, 
representing much, I think, of the best intel- 
ligence of America. 

The women of America seem to me to have 
a fair share of that intelligence, and I met 
many types of them who were interesting as 

4 39 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

social studies. Several states are still re- 
sisting woman suffrage, but as far as equality 
goes in all affairs of daily life outside political 
power the women of America have long 
claimed and gained it. During the war they 
showed in every class, like the women of Eng- 
land, that they could take on men's jobs and 
do them as w^ell as men in most cases, and 
better than men in some cases. They drove 
motor-lorries and machines; they were dairy 
farmers and agriculturists; they became 
munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and 
elevator-girls, and the womanhood of Amer- 
ica rallied up with a wonderful and devoted 
spirit in a great campaign of work for the 
Red Cross and all manner of comforts for the 
troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in 
transport organization, never received many 
of the gifts sent to them by women old and 
young whose eyes and fingers ached with so 
much stitching during the long evenings of 
war. Apart altogether from war-work, Amer- 
ican women have made themselves the better 
halves of men, and the men know it and are 
deferential to the opinions and desires of 
their women-folk. It is natural that women 
should have a wider knowledge of literature 
and ideas in a scheme of life where men have 

40 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

their noses down to the grindstone of work 
for long hours every day. That is what most 
American husbands have to do in a struggle 
for existence which strives up to the posses- 
sion of a Ford car, generally known as a 
"Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to 
a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on 
Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an 
occasional visit to Tiffany's in Fifth Avenue 
for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket 
symbolizing success, a holiday at Palm 
Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a 
relief from boredom after office hours at the 
Forty-fourth Street Theater or the Winter 
Garden. That represents the social ambi- 
tion of the average business man on the road 
to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile of dol- 
lars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high 
strain of nervous tension. Meanwhile the 
women are keeping themselves as beautiful 
as God made them, with slight improvements 
according to their own ideas, which are gen- 
erally wrong; decorating their homes; in- 
creasing their housekeeping expenses, and 
reading prodigiously. They read a vast 
number of books and magazines, so making 
it possible for men like myself — slaves of the 
pen — to exist in an otherwise cruel world, 

41 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Betore the American lady of leisure gets 
up to breakfast (generally she doesn't) and 
uses her lip-salve and powder-puff for the 
first time in the day, she has her counterpane 
spread with the morning's newspapers, which 
are folded into the size of small blankets. 
There is the New York Times for respecta- 
bility, the Tribune for political "pep," and 
the World for social reform. The little lady 
glances first of all at the picture supplements 
while she sips her orange juice, reads the 
head-lines while she gets on with the rolled 
oats, and with the second cup of coffee 
settles down to the solid reading-matter of 
international sensations (skipping, as a rule, 
the ends of columns "continued on page 4"), 
until it is time to interview the cook, who 
again gives notice to leave because of the 
conduct of the chauffeur or the catlike quali- 
ties of the parlor-maid, and handles the tele- 
phone to give her Orders of the Day. For 
some little time after that the telephone is 
kept busy at both ends, and, with a cigarette 
threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady 
of leisure talks to several friends in New 
York, answers a call from the Western 
Union, and receives a night-letter sent over 
the wire. "No, I am absolutely engaged on 

42 




■-■> ,^ 



A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am 
fixed up that day, too. Yes, and Thursday 
is quite out of the question. Friday? Oh, 
hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a 
well-worn New York joke, and I found it 
funny and true to life, because it is as diffi- 
cult to avoid invitations in New York as 
collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little 
red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the 
American lady puts down her engagements 
and the excuses she gave for breaking others 
(it is useful to remember those), and she cal- 
culates that as far as the present day's 
work is planned she will have time to finish 
the new novel by John Galsworthy, to get 
through a pamphlet on bolshevism which was 
mentioned at dinner by an extremely in- 
teresting young man just back from Russia, 
to buy a set of summer furs in the neighbor- 
hood of Forty-second Street (Herbert, poor 
dear! says they are utterly unnecessary), to 
lunch at the Ritz-Carlton with a party of 
friends, including the man who made such a 
sensation w^ith his lecture on France at the 
Carnegie Hall (she will get a lot of first-hand 
knowledge about the French situation), and 
to look in at the the bavardage with dear 
Beatrice de H., where some of the company 

43 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

of the French theater will meet French- 
speaking Americans and pretend to under- 
stand them. Then there is a nice free eve- 
ning, for once (oh, that little white lie in the 
red book!), when she will wallow in the 
latest masterpiece of H. G. Wells and learn 
all about God and humanity as revealed by 
that extraordinary genius with a sense of 
humor. 

So the American lady of leisure keeps up- 
to-date with the world's lighter thought and 
skims the surface of the deeper knowledge, 
using her own common sense as an acid test 
of truth when the imagination of a novelist 
runs away with him, and widening her out- 
look on the problems of life with deliberate 
desire to understand. It makes her con- 
versation at the dinner-table sparkling, and 
the men-folk are conscious that she knows 
more than they do about current literature 
and international history. She has her 
dates right, witliin a century or two, in any 
talk about medieval England, and she knows 
who killed Henri IV of France, who were the 
lovers of Marie de Medici, why Lloyd George 
quarreled with Lord Northcliffe, and what 
the ambassador said to the leaders of Rus- 
sian bolshevism when he met them secretly 

44 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

in Holland. It is useful to know those 
things in any social gathering of intellectu- 
als, and I met several ladies of American so- 
ciety in New York who had a wide range of 
knowledge of that kind. 

Many American ladies, with well-to-do 
husbands, and with money of their own, 
which is very useful to them in time of need, 
do not regard life merely as a game out of 
which they are trying to get the most fun, but 
with more serious views; and I think some 
of those find it hard to satisfy their aspira- 
tions, and go about with a touch, or more, of 
heartache beneath their furs. I met some 
women who spoke with a certain irony which 
reflected the spent light of old illusions, and 
others who had a kind of wistfulness in their 
eyes, as though searching for the unattain- 
able happiness. The Tired Business Man as 
a husband has his limitations, like most 
men. Often his long hours of absence, at the 
office and his dullness at home make his 
wife rather companionless, and her novel- 
reading habits tend to emphasize the loss, 
and force upon her mind the desire for more 
satisfying comradeship. Generally some man 
who enters her circle seems to offer the chance 
of this. He has high ideals, or the pose of 

45 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

them. His silences seem suggestive of deep 
unutterable thoughts — though he may be 
thinking of nothing more important than a 
smudge on his white waistcoat — he has a 
tenderness in his gray (or black, or brown) 
eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman 
chilled by the lack-luster look of the man who 
is used to her presence and takes her for 
granted. . . . The Tired Business Man ought 
to be careful, lest he should become too tired 
to enter into the interests of his wife and to 
give her the minimum of comradeship which 
all women demand. The American Woman 
of Society, outside the Catholic Church, 
which still insists upon the old law, seems to 
me quicker than most others to cut her losses 
in the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks 
she finds, that she is losing too heavily for 
her peace of heart. Less than women in 
European countries will she tolerate deceit 
or spiritual cruelty, and the law offers her a 
way of escape, expensive but certain, from a 
partnership w^hich has been broken. So- 
ciety, in New" York at least, is tolerant to 
women who have dissolved their married 
partnership, and there is no stoning-sister- 
hood to fling mud and missiles at those who 
have already paid for error by many tears. 

46 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

Yet I doubt whether, in many cases, the 
liberty they find makes for happiness. There 
is always the fear of a second mistake worse 
than the first, and, anyhow, some unattached 
women I met, women w^ho could afford to 
live alone, not without a certain luxury of 
independence, seemed disillusioned as to the 
romance of life, and the honesty of men, and 
their own chance of happiness. Their furs 
and their diamonds were no medicine for the 
bitterness of their souls, nor for the hunger in 
their hearts. 

But I found a great class of women in 
America too busy, too interested, and too 
inspired by common sense to be worried by 
that kind of emotional distress — the middle- 
class women who flung themselves into war- 
work, as before, and now, in time of peace, 
the activities of charity and education and 
domestic life have called to them for service. 
There was a woman doctor I met who seemed 
to me as fine a type of American womanhood 
as one could have the luck to meet, and yet, 
in spite of uncommon ability, a common type 
in her cheery and practical character. When 
the war broke out her husband, who was a 
doctor also, was called to serve in the Ameri- 
can army, and his wife, who had passed her 

47 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

medical examinations in the same college 
with him, but had never practised, carried 
on his work, in spite of four children. They 
came first and her devotion to them was not 
altered, but that did not prevent her from 
attending to a growing list of patients at a 
time when influenza was raging in her dis- 
trict. She went about in a car which she 
drove herself, with the courage and cheer- 
fulness of a gallant soldier. In her little 
battlefield there were many tragedies, be- 
cause death took away the youngest-born or 
the eldest-born from many American homes, 
and her heart was often heavy; but she re- 
sisted all gloomy meditations and kept her 
nerve and her spirit by — singing. As she 
drove her car from the house of one patient 
to another she sang loudly to herself, over 
the wheel, any little old song that came into 
her head — "Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and 
the fiddle," or "Old King Cole was a merry 
old soul, and a merry old soul was he," — to 
the profound astonishment of passers-by, who 
shook their heads and said, "It's a good thing 
there's going to be Prohibition." But she 
saved the lives of many women and children 
in time of plague — for the influenza reached 
the height of plague — and did not lose her 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

sense of humor or lier fine, hearty laugh, or 
her graciousness of womanhood. When " the 
army," as she called her husband, came 
back, she could say, "I kept your flag flying, 
old man, and you'll not find any difference 
at home." I saw the husband and wife in 
their home together. While friends were 
singing round the piano, these two held 
hands like young lovers, away back in a 
shady corner of the room. 

I met another husband and w^ife who in- 
terested me as types of American life, though 
not in their home. It was at a banquet at- 
tended by about two hundred people. The 
husband was the chairman of the party, and 
he had a wonderful way of making little 
speeches in which he called upon distin- 
guished people to talk to the company, 
revealing in each case the special reason why 
that man or woman should have a hearing. 
He did this with wit and knowledge, and in 
each case indeed it was a privilege to hear 
the speaker who followed, because all the men 
and women here were engaged in some social 
work of importance in the life of great Ameri- 
can cities, and were idealists who had put 
their theories into practice by personal ser- 
vice and self-sacrifice. The little man who 

49 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

was the chairman paid a compliment to his 
own wife, and I found she was sitting by nw 
side. She had gray hair, but very 3'oung, 
bright, humorous eyes, and an almost terrible 
truthfulness of speech. I was startled by 
some things she said about the war, and the 
psychology of men and women under the 
spell of war. They were true, but dangerous 
to speak aloud as this woman spoke them. 
Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred'* 
that had been bequeathed by war to the 
people of the world. "Let us kill hatred, 
she said. "It is the survival of the cave 
instinct in man which comes out of its hiding- 
places under the name of patriotism and 
justice." I do not know what link there was 
between this and some other thought which 
prompted her to show me photographs of 
two big, sturdy boys who, she told me, were 
her adopted children. It was a queer, 
touching story, about these children. "I 
adopted them not for their sake, but for 
mine," she said. She was a lonely woman, 
well married, with leisure and money, and 
the temptation of selfishness. It was to 
prevent selfishness creeping into her heart 
that she sent round to an orphanage for two 
boy-babies. They were provided, and she 

50 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

brought them up as her own, and found — so 
she assured me — that they grew up with a 
marked Hkeness in feature to herself and her 
sisters. She had a theory about that — the 
idea that by some kind of predestination 
souls reach through space to one another, and 
find the home w^here love is waiting for them. 
I was skeptical of that, having known the 
London slums, but I was interested in the 
practical experience of the bright little 
American woman, who "selfishly," as she 
said, to cure selfishness, had given two 
abandoned babies of the world the gift of 
love, and a great chance in the adventure of 
life. She was a tremendous protagonist of 
environment against the influence of hered- 
ity. "Environment puts it over heredity all 
the time," she said. 

This special charity on her part is not 
typical of American women, who do not, 
any more than women of other countries, go 
about adopting other people's babies, but I 
think that her frankness of speech to a 
stranger like myself, and her curious mixture 
of idealism and practicality, combined with 
a certain shrewdness of humor, are qualities 
that come to people in America. She her- 
self, indeed, is a case of "environment," be- 

51 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

cause she is foreign in blood, and American 
only by marriage. 

In New York I had the advantage of 
meeting one lady who seemed to me typical 
of the old-fashioned "leaders" of American 
society such as Henry James described in his 
novels. She lives in one of the great man- 
sions along Fifth Avenue, and the very ap- 
pearance of her butler is a guaranty of 
riches and respectability. She made no 
disguise of her wealth, and was proud of it 
in a simple way, as an English aristocrat is 
proud of his ancestry and family treasures. 
But she acknowledges its responsibilities and 
takes them seriously with a sense of duty. 
She had received lessons in public speaking, 
in order to hold her own at committee meet- 
ings, and she doles out large sums in charity 
to public institutions and deserving cases, 
with a grim determination to unmask the 
professional beggar and the fraudulent so- 
ciety. She seemed to have a broad-hearted 
tolerance for the younger generation and a 
special affection for boys of all ages, whom 
she likes to feed up, and to keep amused by 
treating them to the circus or the "movies"; 
but I fancy that she is a stern disciplinarian 
with her family as well as her servants, and 

62 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

that her own relatives stand in awe of this 
masterful old lady who has a high sense of 
honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and 
service from those who look for her favors 
and her money. I detected a shrewd humor 
in her and an abiding common sense, and at 
her own dinner-table she had a way of cross- 
examining her guests, who were men of 
political importance and women of social 
influence, like a judge who desires to get at 
the evidence without listening to unnecessary 
verbiage. She is the widow of a successful 
business man, but I perceived in her the sense 
of personal power and family traditions which 
belonged to the old type of dowager-duchess 
in England. Among butterfly women of 
European cities she would appear an austere 
and terrible figure in her virtue and her dia- 
monds, but to small American boys, eating 
candies at her side in the circus, she is the 
kind and thoughtful aunt. 

It was in Boston that I met some other 
types of American women, not long enough 
to know them w^ell, but enough to see super- 
ficial differences of character between them 
and their friends of New York. Needless to 
say, I had read a good deal ^bout Boston 
before going there. In England the Bos- 

63 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

tonlan tradition is familiar to us by the 
glory of such masters as Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, so that I had a friendly feeling 
when I went about the city and saw its 
streets and prim houses, reminiscent of 
Cheltenham and other English towns of 
ancient respectability and modern culture. 
After a lecture there many Bostonians came 
onto the platform, and I heard at once a 
difference in accent from the intonation of 
New York. It was a little more precise, 
with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. 
The people who spoke to me were earnest 
souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift 
them above the personal prejudices of party 
politics. I should imagine that some of 
them are republican rather than democratic 
in instinct, but those at least who were in my 
audience supported the idea of the League of 
Nations, and for that reason did not wish to 
see President Wilson boiled in oil or roasted 
at a slow fire. From my brief glimpses of 
Boston society I should imagine that the Pur- 
itan spirit still lingers there among the "best 
families" and that in little matters of eti- 
quette and social custom they adhere to the 
rules of the Early Victorian era of English life. 

54 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

I was convinced of this by one trivial inci- 
dent I observed in a hotel at Boston. A 
lady, obviously in transit from New York, 
by the public way in which she used her 
powder-puff, and by a certain cosmopolitan 
easiness of manner, produced a gold cigarette- 
case from her muff, and began to smoke with- 
out thinking twice about it. She had taken 
just three whiffs when a colored waiter ap- 
proached in the most deferential manner 
and begged her to put out her cigarette, be- 
cause smoking was not allowed in the public 
rooms. The lady from New York looked 
amazed for a moment. Then she laughed, 
dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, 
and said: "Oh yes — I guess I forgot I was 
in Boston!" In that word Boston she ex- 
pressed a world of propriety, conventional 
morality, and social austerity, a long, long 
way from the liberty of New York. I had 
been told that a Boston audience would be 
very cold and unenthusiastic, not because 
they would be out of sympathy with the lec- 
turer, but because they were "very English" 
in their dislike of emotional expression. My 
experience was not like that, as I was re- 
lieved to find, and, on the contrary, those 
Bostonians at the Symphony Hall applauded 

K 55 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

With most generous warmth and even rose 
and cheered when I had finished my story of 
the heroic deeds of EngUsh soldiers. It was 
a Boston girl who made the apologia of her 
people. "I am sm-e," she said, "that all 
those men and women who rose to applaud 
went down on their knees that night and 
asked God to forgive them for having broken 
their rule of life." 

No doubt Boston society, as far as it in- 
cludes the old families rooted in it for genera- 
tions, is conservative in its point of view, 
and looks askance at noisy innovations like 
modern American dances, jazz bands, and 
the jolly vulgarities of youth. But, judging 
from my passing glimpses of college girls in 
the town, I should say that youth puts up a 
healthy opposition to the "old fogy" philos- 
ophy, and breaks the conventions now and 
then with a crash. One girl I met suggests 
to me that Boston produces character by in- 
tensive culture, and is apt to be startled by 
the result. Her father was a WTll-known 
lawyer, and she inherited his gift of learning 
and logic, so that when he died she had the 
idea of carrying on his work. The war was 
on, and somewhere over on the western 
front was a young English soldier w^hom she 

56 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

had met on board ship and might, according 
to the chances of war, never meet again. 
Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. 
She decided to study for the law examinations 
and to be called to the bar; and to keep her 
company, her mother, who was her best 
comrade, went into college with her, and 
shared her rooms. I like that idea of the 
mother and daughter reading and working 
together. It seems to me a good picture. 
In due time she was called to the bar, and 
entered the chambers where her father had 
worked, and did so well that a great lawyer 
who gave her his cases to prepare spoke rare 
words of praise about her. Then the war 
ended, one day, quite suddenly, the young 
English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after 
a few preliminary inquiries as to his chance 
of luck, said, "When shall we get married.'^" 
He was in a hurry to settle down, and the 
mother of the girl was scared by his grim 
determination to carry her comrade away. 
Yet he was considerate. "I should hate to 
cause your mother any worry by hurrying 
things on so fast as Monday," he said. 
"Let us make it Tuesday." But the wed- 
ding took place on the Saturday before the 
Tuesday, and the young lady barrister of 

57 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Boston was wliisked away four days after 
the English officer came to America with a 
dream in his heart of which he desired the 
fulfilment. Boston was startled. This ro- 
mance was altogether too rapid for its peace 
of mind. Why, there was no time to buy 
the girl a wedding-present! . . . The street 
boys of Boston were most startled by the 
English officer's best man — his brother — 
whose tall hat, tail-coat, and white spats 
were more wonderful than anything they had 
seen before. 

I was not long enough in many towns of 
America to detect their various character- 
istics. Philadelphia, I was told in New 
York, was so slow that it was safe for people 
to fall out of windows — they just wafted 
down like gossamer — but I found it a pleas- 
ant, bustling place, with a delightful Old 
World atmosphere, like a bit of Queen 
Anne-England, round Independence Hall. . . . 
Pittsburgh by night, looking down on its 
blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared 
to me like a town behiml the battle-lines 
under heaA'y gun-fire, and I am convinced 
that the workers in those factories are in 
the front-line trenches of life and deserve 
gold medals for their heroism. I had not 

58 



SOME PEOPLE 1 MET IN AMERICA 

been in the town ten minutes before a young 
lady with the poetical name of Penelope 
rang me up on the telephone and implored 
me to take a walk out by night to see this 
strange and wonderful picture, and I was 
glad of her advice, though she did not offer 
to go as my guide. Another girl made her- 
self acquainted, and I found she has a hero- 
worship for a fellow war correspondent, once 
of Pittsburgh, whose career she had fol- 
lowed through many battlefields. 

I saw Washington in glamorous sunlight 
under a blue sky, and found my spirit lifted 
up by the white beauty of its buildings and 
the spaciousness of its public gardens. I 
had luncheon with the British ambassador, 
curious to find myself in an English house- 
hold, with people discussing America from 
the English point of view in the political 
heart of the United States; and I visited 
the War College and met American generals 
and officers in the very brain-center of that 
great army which I had seen on the roads of 
France and on the battlefields. This was 
the University of War as far as the American 
people are concerned, and there were dia- 
grams on the blackboards in the lecture-hall 
describing the strateg;^^ of the western front, 

59 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

while in the library officers and clerks were 
tabulating the history of the great massacre 
in Europe for future guidance, which by the 
grace of God and the League of Nations will 
be unnecessary for generations to come. 
I talked with these officers and found them 
just such earnest, serious scientific men as 
I had met in American Headquarters in 
France, where they were conducting war, not 
in our casual, breezy way, but as school- 
masters arranging a college demonstration, 
and overweighted by responsibility. It was 
in a room in the Capitol that I met one 
little lady with a complete geographical 
knowledge of the great halls and corridors 
of that splendid building, and an Irish way 
with her in her dealings with American Con- 
gressmen and Senators. Before the war I 
used to meet her in a little drawing-room 
not far away from Kensington Palace, Lon- 
don, and I imagined in my innocence that 
she was exclusively interested in literature 
and drama. But in one of the luncheon- 
rooms of the Capitol — where I lined up at 
the counter for a deep-dish pie from a colored 
waitress — I found that she was dealing with 
more inflammable articles than those appear- 
ing in newspaper columns, being an organ- 

60 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

izlng secretary of the Sinn Fein movement in 
the United States. She was happy in her 
work, and spoke of Irish rebellion in that 
bright and placid way which belongs, as I 
have often noticed, to revolutionary spirits 
who help to set nations on fire and drench 
the world in blood. Anybody looking at 
her eating that deep-dish pie in the luncheon- 
room of the American Houses of Parliament 
would have put her down as a harmless little 
lady, engaged, perhaps, in statistical work 
on behalf of Prohibition. But I knew the 
flame in her soul, kindled by Irish history, 
was of the same fire which I saw burning in 
the eyes of great mobs whom I saw passing 
one day in procession down Fifth Avenue, 
with anti-English banners above their heads. 
I should have liked to see more of Chicago. 
There seemed to me in that great city an in- 
tense intellectual activity, of conscious and 
deliberate energy. Removed by a thousand 
miles from New York with its more cosmo- 
politan crowds and constant influx of Euro- 
pean visitors, it is self-centered and inde- 
pendent, and out of its immense population 
there are many minds emerging to make it a 
center of musical, artistic, and educational 
life, apart altogether from its business dynam- 

61 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

ics. I became swallowed up in the crowds 
along Michigan Avenue, and was caught in 
the breeze that blew stiffly down the highway 
of this "windy city," and studied the shops 
and theaters and picture-palaces with a 
growing consciousness that here was a world 
almost as great as New York and, I imagine, 
more essentially American in character and 
views. That first morning of my visit I was 
the guest of a club called the Cliff-dwellers, 
where the chairman rapped for order on the 
table with a club that might have protected 
the home of Prehistoric Man, and addressed 
a gathering of good fellows who, as jour- 
nalists, authors, painters, and musicians, are 
farthest removed from that simple child of 
nature who went out hunting for his dinner, 
and bashed his wife when she gnawed the 
meatiest bone. It was in the time of armis- 
tice, and these men were deeply anxious 
about the new problems which faced Amer- 
ica and about the reshaping of the world's 
philosophy. They were generous and honest 
in their praise of England's mighty effort in 
the war, and they were enthusiastic to a 
man in the belief that an Anglo-iVmerican 
alliance was the best guaranty of the League 
of Nations, and the best hope for the safety 

62 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

of civilization. I came away with the belief 
that out of Chicago would come help for the 
idealists of our future civilization, out of 
Chicago, whatever men may say of its Pit, 
and its slaughter-yards, and its jungle of 
industry and life. For on the walls of the 
Cliff-dwellers were paintings of men who 
have beauty in their hearts, and in the eyes 
of the men I met was a look of gravity and 
thoughtfulness in face of the world's agonies 
and conflict. But I was aware, also, that 
among the seething crowds of that city were 
mobs of foreign-born people who have the 
spirit of revolution in their hearts, and others 
who demand more of the joy of life and less 
of its struggle, and men of baseness and bru- 
tality, coarsened by the struggle through 
which they have to push and thrust in order 
to get a living. I listened to Germans and 
foreign Jews in some of the streets of Chicago, 
and saw in imagination the flames and smoke 
of passion that stir above the Melting-pot. 
I have memories in Chicago of a little 
theatrical manager who took my arm and 
pressed it tight with new-born affection, and 
said: "My dearie, I'm doing colossal busi- 
ness — over two thousand dollars a night! 
It's broken all the records. I go about 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

singing with happiness." Success had made 
a poet of him. In a private suite of rooms in 
the most luxurious hotel of Chicago I met 
one of the theatrical stars of America, and 
studied her type as one might gaze at a rare 
bird. She was a queer little bird, I found, 
with a childish and simple way of speech 
which disguised a little her immense and 
penetrating knowledge of human nature as 
it is found in "one-night stands," in the 
jungle of life behind the scenes, and in her 
own grim and gallant fight for fame. Fame 
had come to her suddenly and overwhelm- 
ingly, in Chicago, and New York was waiting 
for her. The pride of her achievement 
thrilled her to the finger-tips, and she was as 
happy as a little girl who has received her 
first doll as a birthday-present. She talked 
to me about her technic, about the way in 
which she had lived in her part before acting 
it, so that she felt herself to be the heroine in 
body and soul. But what I liked best— 
and tried to believe — was her whispered 
revelation of her ultimate ambition — and 
that was a quiet marriage with a boy who 
was "over there," if he did not keep her 
waiting too long. Marriage, and not fame, 
was what she wanted most (so she said), but 

G4 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

she was going to be very, very careful to 
make the right one. She had none of the 
luxurious splendor of those American stars 
who appear in fiction and photographs. She 
was a bright little canary, with pluck, and a 
touch of genius, and a shrewd common 
sense. 

From her type I passed to others, a world 
away in mode of life — Congressmen, leaders 
of the women's suffrage societies, ex-gover- 
nors, business magnates, American officers 
back from the front, foreign oflScers begging 
for American money, British propagandists 
— a most unlikely crowd — dramatic critics, 
shipbuilders, and the society of New York 
suburbs between Mamaroneck and Green- 
wich, Connecticut. At dinner-parties and 
evening receptions I met these different 
actors in the great drama of American life, 
and found them, in that time of armistice, 
desperately earnest about the problems of 
peace, intrigued to the point of passion about 
the policy of President Wilson, divided hope- 
lessly in ideals and convictions, so that 
husbands and wives had to declare a No 
Man's Land between their conflicting views, 
and looking forward to the future with pro- 
found uneasiness because of the threat to the 

65 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

*' splendid isolation" of the Monroe Doctrine 
— they saw it crumbling away from them — 
and because (more alarming still) they heard 
from afar the first rumblings of a terrific 
storm between capital and labor. They 
spoke of these things frankly, with an evi- 
dent sincerity and with a fine gravity — 
women as well as men, young girls as fear- 
lessly and intelligently as bald-headed busi- 
ness men. Many of them deplored the late 
entry of the United States into the war, be- 
cause they believed their people would have 
gained by longer sacrifice. With all their 
pride in the valor of their men, not one of 
them in my hearing used a braggart word, or 
claimed too great a share in the honor of 
victory. There was fear among them that 
their President was abandoning principles of 
vital import to their country, but no single 
man or woman I met spoke selfishl}' of 
America's commercial or political interest, 
and among all the people with whom I came 
in touch there was a. deep sense of respon- 
sibility and a desire to help the world for- 
ward by wise action on the part of the 
United States. Their trouble was that they 
lacked clear guidance, and were groping 
blindly about for the right thing to do, in a 

66 



SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 

practical, common-sense way. I had serious 
conversations in those assembhes, until my 
head ached, but they were not without a 
lighter side, and I was often startled by the 
eager way in which American middle-class 
society abandons the set etiquette of an 
evening party for charades, a fox-trot (with 
the carpets thrown back), a game of "twenty 
questions," or a riot of laughter between a 
cocktail and a highball. At those hours the 
youth of America was revealed. Its society 
is not so old as our tired, saddened people of 
Europe, wlio look back wdth melanchol}' 
upon the four years in which their young men 
perished, and forward without great hope. 
The vitality of America has hardly been 
touched by her sacrifice, and the heart of 
America is high. 



Ill 

THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

SOME Englishmen, I am told, go to the 
United States with a spirit of criticism, 
and search round for things that seem to 
them objectionable, taking no pains to con- 
ceal their hostile point of view. They are 
so hopelessly insular that they resent any 
little differences in social custom between 
American and English life, and sum up their 
annoyance by saying, "We don't do that 
sort of thing in England ! " Well, that seems 
to me a foolish way of approach to any coun- 
try, and the reason why some types of Eng- 
lishmen are so unpopular in France, Italy, 
and other countries, where they go about 
regarding "the natives," as they call them, 
with arrogance in their eyes, and talk, as an 
English oJGBcer, not of that type, expressed it 
to me, "as though they had bad smells at 
the end of their noses." I am bound to say 
that during my visit to the United States I 
found much more to admire than to criticize, 

68 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

and perhaps because I was on the lookout 
for things to like rather than to dislike I had 
one of the best times of my life — in some 
ways the very best — and came away with 
respect, admiration, and gratitude for the 
American people. There are so many things 
I like in their character and way of life that 
I should be guilty of gushing if I put them 
all down, but although I have no doubt they 
have many faults, like most people in this 
world, I prefer to remember the pleasant, 
rather than the unpleasant, qualities they 
possess, especially as they left the most 
dominant impression on my mind. 

I think every Englishman, however critical, 
would agree that he is struck at once, on his 
first visit to America, by the clean, bright, 
progressive spirit of life in the smaller 
towns beyond the turmoil of New York. I 
have already described the sensational effect 
produced upon one's imagination by that 
great city, and have given some glimpses of 
various aspects of the social life which I had 
the good fortune to see with untiring in- 
terest; but I confess that the idea of living 
in New York would affright me because of 
its wear and tear upon the nerves, and I 
think that the "commuters" who dwell in 

69 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the suburbs have good sense and better luck. 
The reahties of America — the average idea, 
the middle-class home, the domestic quali- 
ties upon which a nation is built — are to be 
found more deeply rooted in the suburbs 
and smaller towns than in the whirligig of 
Manhattan Island, to which a million and a 
half people, I am told, come every day, and 
from which, after business or pleasure, they 
go away. To me there was something very 
attractive in the construction of such places 
as Rye, Port Chester, Greenwich, and Stam- 
ford, an hour away from New York, and 
many other townships of similar size in other 
parts of the United States. I liked the style 
of their houses, those neat buildings of wood 
with overlapping shingles, and wide porches 
and verandas where people may sit out on 
summer days, with shelter from the sun; 
and I liked especially the old Colonial type 
of house, as I think it is called, with a tall 
white pillar on each side of its portico, and 
well-proportioned windows, so that the rooms 
have plenty of light, and as much air as the 
central -heating system permits — and that is 
not much. To English eyes accustomed to 
dingy brick houses in the suburbs of big 
cities, to the dreary squalor of some new 

70 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

little town which straggles around a filthy 
railway station, with refuse-heaps in unde- 
veloped fields, and a half -finished "High 
Street," where a sweetstuff-shop, a stationer, 
and an estate agent establish themselves in 
the gloomy hope of business, these American 
villages look wonderfully clean, bright, and 
pleasant. I noticed that in each one of them 
there were five institutions in which the 
spirit of the community was revealed — the 
bank, the post-ofiice, the school, the church, 
and the picture-palace. The bank is gener- 
ally the handsomest building in the place, 
with a definite attempt to give it some dig- 
nity of architecture and richness of decora- 
tion. Inside it has marble pillars and pan- 
els, brass railings at the receipt of custom, a 
brightly burnished mechanism for locking up 
the safe, a tiled floor of spotless cleanliness. 
The local tradesman feels secure in putting 
his money in such a place of dignity, the 
local lady likes to come here in the morning 
(unless she has overdrawn her account) for 
a chat with the bank manager or one of his 
gentlemanly assistants. It is a social ren- 
dezvous dedicated to the spirit of success, 
and the bank manager, who knows the pri- 
vate business and the social adventures of 

6 71 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

his clients, is in a position of confidence and 
esteem. He is pleased to shake the finger- 
tips of a lady through the brass raihngs; 
while she is pleased to ask hini, "How do you 
like my new hat?" and laughs when, with 
grave eyes, he expresses sympathy with her 
husband. "Twenty years ago he was serving 
behind the counter in a dry-goods store. 
Now he has a million dollars to his credit." 
Everybody brightens at this story of suc- 
cess. The fact that a man starts as a 
butcher-boy or a bell-boy is all in his favor 
in social prestige. There is no snobbishness, 
contemptuous of humble origin, and I found 
a spirit of good-natured democracy among 
the people I watched in the local bank. 

Competing with the bank in architectural 
dignity is the village post-office, generally of 
white stone, or wood, with the local Roll of 
Honor on the green outside, and, inside, a 
number of picture-posters calling to the 
patriotism of the American people to sup- 
port the Liberty Loan — the fifth when I was 
there. Small boys at the counter are buying 
thrift stamps. Chauffeurs who have driven 
down from country houses are collecting the 
letters of the family from lockers, with pri- 
vate keys. College girls are exchanging 

72 




THE SOCIAL ATMOSPHERE OF AX AMERICAX POST-OFFICE 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

confidences at the counters. I liked the so- 
cial atmosphere of an American post-office. 
I seemed to see a visible friendliness here 
between the state and the people. Then 
there is the school, and I must say that I 
was overwhelmed with admiration for the 
American system of education and for the 
buildings in which it is given. England 
lags a long way behind here, with its old- 
fashioned hotch-potch of elementary schools, 
church schools, "academies for young gen- 
tlemen" — the breeding-grounds of snobs — 
grammar-schools, and private, second-rate 
colleges; all of which complications are 
swept away by the clean simplicity of the 
American state school, to which boys of 
every class may go without being handi- 
capped by the caste system which is the 
curse of England. If the school to which I 
went at Montclair, or another at Elizabeth, 
New Jersey, or another at Toledo, is at all 
typical of American schools generally (and 
I think that is so), I take my hat off to the 
educational authorities of America and to 
the spirit of the people which inspires them. 
The school at Montclair was, I remember, 
a handsome building like one of the English 
colleges for women at Oxford or Cambridge, 

73 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

with admirably designed rooms, light, airy, 
and beautiful with their polished paneling. 
The lecture-hall was a spacious place hold- 
ing, I suppose, nearly a thousand people, 
and I was astonished at its proportions when 
I had my first glimpse of it before lecturing, 
under the guidance of the head-mistress and 
some of the ladies on her committee. Those 
women impressed me as being wise and 
broad-minded souls, not shut up in narrow 
educational theories, but with a knowledge 
of life and human nature, and a keen enthu- 
siasm for their work. At Toledo I saw the 
best type of provincial school, and certainly 
as an architectural model it was beyond all 
words of praise, built in what we call the 
Tudor style, in red brick, ivy covered, with 
long oriel windows, so that it lifts up the 
tone of the whole town because of its dig- 
nity and beauty. Here, too, was a fine 
lecture-hall, easily convertible into a theater, 
with suitable scenery for any school play. 
It was a committee of boys who organized 
the lectures, and one of them acted as my 
guide over the school-building and showed 
me, among other educational arrangements, 
a charming little flat, or apartment-house, 
completely furnished in every detail in bed- 

74 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

room, sitting-room, and kitchen, for the 
training of girls in domestic service, cookery, 
and the decoration of the home. Here, as 
in many other things, the American mind 
had reached out to an ideal and linked it up 
with practical method. Equally good were 
the workshops where the boys are trained in 
carpentry and mechanics. . . . Well, all that 
kind of thing makes for greatness in a nation. 
The American people are not, I think, better 
educated than English people in the actual 
storing-up of knowledge, but they are edu- 
cated in better physical conditions, with a 
brighter atmosphere around them in their 
class-rooms and in their playgrounds, and 
with a keener appreciation in the social in- 
fluences surrounding the schoolhouse of the 
inherent right of every American boy and 
girl to have equal opportunities along the 
road to knowledge and success. It is this 
sense of opportunity, and the entire absence 
of snob privileges, which I liked best in these 
glimpses I gained of young America. . . . 

I mentioned another institution which 
occupies a prominent place in every American 
township. That is the picture-palace. It 
is impossible to overrate the influence upon 
the minds and characters of the people 

75 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

which IS exercised by that house of assembly. 
It has become part of the life of the American 
people more essentially than we know it in 
England, though it has spread with a mush- 
room growth in English towns and villages. 
But in the United States the picture-palace 
and "The Silent Drama," as they call it, 
are more elaborately organized, and the mo- 
tion pictures are produced with an amount 
of energy, imagination, and wealth which 
are far in excess of the similar efforts in 
England. A visit to the "movies" is the 
afternoon or evening recreation of every 
class and age of American citizenship. It 
is a democratic habit from which few escape. 
Outside the picture-palace in a little town 
like Stamford one sees a number of expensive 
motor-cars drawn up while the lady of leisure 
gets her daily dose of "romance" and while 
her chauffeur, in the gallery, watches scenes 
of high life with the cynical knowledge of a 
looker-on. Nursemaids alleviate the bore- 
dom of domestic service by taking their 
children to see the pictures for an hour or 
two, and small boys and girls, with candy or 
chewing-gum to keep them quiet, puzzle out 
the meaning of marvelous melodrama, won- 
der why lovers do such strange things in 

76 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

their adventures on the way to marriage; 
and they watch with curiosity and surprise 
the ghastly grimaces of "close-up" heroines 
in contortions of amorous despair, and the 
heaving breasts, the rolling eyes, and the 
sickly smiles of padded heroes, who are 
suffering, temporarily, from thwarted affec- 
tion. The history of the world is ransacked 
for thrilling dramas, and an American audi- 
ence watches all the riotous splendor and 
licentiousness of Babylon or ancient Rome, 
while Theda Bara, the Movie Queen, writhes 
in amorous ecstasy, or poisons innumerable 
lovers, or stings herself to death with ser- 
pents. Royalists and Roundheads, Pilgrim 
Fathers and New England witches, the 
French Revolution and the American Civil 
War, are phases of history which provide 
endless pictures of *' soul-stirring interest"; 
but more popular are domestic dramas of 
modern life, in which the luxury of our 
present civilization, as it is imagined and 
exaggerated by the movie managers, reveal 
to simple folk the wickedness of wealthy 
villains, the dangers of innocent girlhood, 
and the appalling adventures of psychology 
into which human nature is led when "love" 
takes possession of the heart. It is impos- 

77 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

sible to say what effect all that has upon the 
mentality of America. The utter falsity of 
it all, the treacly sentiment of the *'love" 
episodes, and the flaming vice of the vicious, 
would have a perverting influence on public 
imagination if it were taken seriously. But 
I suppose that the common sense of American 
people reacts against the absurdity of these 
melodramas after yielding to the sensation 
of them. Yet I met one lady who told me 
she goes every free afternoon to one of these 
entertainments, with a deliberate choice of 
film-plays depicting passion and caveman 
stuff '*in order to get a thrill before dinner 
to relieve the boredom of domesticity." 
That seems to me as bad as the drug habit, 
and must in the long run sap the moral and 
spiritual foundations of a woman's soul. 
Fortunately, there is a tendency now among 
the "movie merchants" to employ good 
authors who will provide them with simple 
and natural plots, and in any case there is 
always Charlie Chaplin for laughter, and 
pictures of scenery and animal life, and the 
news of the week depicting scenes of current 
history in all parts of the world. It would 
be absurd as well as impossible to abolish 
the film-picture as an influence in American 

78 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

life, and I dare say that, balancing good with 
bad, the former tips the swing, because of 
an immense source of relaxation and enter- 
tainment provided by the picture-palace in 
small communities. 

What appealed to me more in my brief 
study of American social life outside New 
York was another popular institution known 
as the roadside inn. In some way It is a 
conscious endeavor to get back to the sim- 
plicity and good cheer of old-fashioned times, 
when the grandfathers and grandmothers of 
the present generation used to get down from 
their coaches when the horses were changed, 
or the snowdrifts were deep, and go gladly 
to the warmth of a log fire, in a wayside 
hostelry, while orders were given for a dinner 
of roast duck, and a bowl of punch was 
brewed by the ruddy -faced innkeeper. It is 
a tradition which is kept fresh in the imagi- 
nation of modern Americans by the genius of 
Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and a 
host of writers and painters who reproduce 
the atmosphere of English life In the days of 
coaching, highwaymen, romance, and roast 
beef. The spirit of Charles Dickens Is care- 
fully suggested to all wayfarers in one road- 
side inn I visited, about an hour away from 

79 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

New York, and called "The Pickwick Inn." 
It IS built in the style of Tudor England, 
with wooden beams showing through its 
brickwork and windows divided into little 
leaded panes, and paneled rooms furnished 
with wooden settles and gate-leg tables. 
Colored prints depicting scenes in the im- 
mortal history of Mr. Pickwick brighten the 
walls within. Outside there swings a sign- 
board such as one sees still outside country 
inns standing on the edge of village greens 
in England. I found it a pleasant place, 
where one could talk better with a friend 
than in a gilded restaurant of New York, 
with a jazz band smiting one's eardrums; 
and the company there was interesting. In 
spite of the departure of coaching days, 
which gave life and bustle to the old inns of 
the past, the motor-car brings travelers and 
a touch of romance to these modern sub- 
stitutes. There were several cars outside 
the "Pickwick," and I guessed by the look 
of the party within that they had come from 
New York for a country outing, a simple 
meal, and private conversation. "Better a 
dinner of herbs where love is — " Under the 
portrait of Mr. Pickwick in a quiet corner of 
one of the old-fashioned rooms a young man 

80 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

and woman sat with their elbows on the table 
and their chins propped in the palms of their 
hands, and their faces not so far away that 
they had any need to shout to each other 
the confidences which made both pairs of 
eyes remarkably bright. The young man 
was one of those square-shouldered, clean- 
shaven, gray-eyed fellows whom I came to 
know as a type on the roads to Amiens and 
Albert. The girl had put her dust-cloak 
over the back of her chair, but still wore a 
veil tied round her hat and under her chin — 
a little pointed chin dug firmly into her palm, 
and modeled with the same delicacy of line 
as the lips about which a little smile wavered, 
and as the nose which kept its distance, with 
perfect discretion, from that of the young 
man opposite, so that the waiter might have 
slipped a menu-card between them. She 
had a string of pearls round her neck which 
would certainly have been the first prize of 
any highwayman holding up her great-grand- 
mamma's coach, and judging from other 
little signs of luxury as it is revealed in 
Fifth Avenue, I felt certain that the young 
lady did not live far from the heart of New 
York and had conm^iand of its treasure- 
houses. . . . Two other groups in the room, 

81 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

sitting at separate tables, belonged obviously 
to one party. They were young people, for 
the most part, with one elderly lady whose 
white hair and shrewd, smiling eyes made all 
things right with youthful adventure, and 
with one old fogy, bland of countenance and 
expansive in the waistcoat line, who seemed 
to regard it as a privilege to pay for the large 
appetites of the younger company. Any- 
how he paid for at least eight portions of 
chicken okra, followed by eight plates of 
roast turkey and baked potatoes, and, not 
counting sundries, nine serves of deep-dish 
pie. The ninth, unequal, share went, in 
spite of warnings, protests, and ridicule from 
free-spoken companions, to a pliunp girl 
with a pigtail, obviously home from college 
for a spell, who said: "I guess I sha'n't die 
from overeating, though it's the way I'd 
choose if I had to quit. An appetite is like 
love. Its dangers are exaggerated, and sel- 
dom fatal." This speech, delivered in all 
solemnity, aroused a tumult of mirth from 
several young wonijen of grown-up appear- 
ance — at least the}' had advanced beyond the 
pigtail stage — and under cover of this one of 
them deliberately "made up" her face till it 
bloomed like a rose in June. In another 

82 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

corner of the Pickwick Inn sat a lonely man 
whose appearance interested me a good deal. 
He was a man of middle age, with black hair 
turning white, and very dark, melancholy 
eyes in a pale, ascetic face. I have seen his 
type many times in the Cafe de I'Odeon on 
the "Latin " side of Paris, and I was surprised 
to find it in a roadside inn of the United 
States. A friend of mine, watching the di- 
rection of my gaze, said, "Yes, that is a 
remarkable man — one of the best-known 
architects in America, and, among other 
things, the designer of the Victory decora- 
tions of New York." He came over to our 
table and I had a talk with him — a strange 
conversation, in which this man of art spoke 
mostly of war, from unusual angles of 
thought. His idea seemed to me that peace 
is only a preparation for war, and that war 
is not the abnormal thing which most people 
think, but the normal, because it is the neces- 
sary conflict by which human character and 
destiny are shaped. He seemed to think 
that the psychology of the world had become 
twisted and weakened by too much peace 
so that the sight of armless or legless men was 
horrifying, whereas people should be accus- 
tomed to such sights and take them for 

83 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

granted, because that, with all pain and 
suffering, is the price of hfe. I disagreed 
with him profoundly, believing that war in 
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is un- 
necessary and due to the stupidities of people 
who are doped by spell-words put upon them 
by their leaders; but I was interested in 
getting this viewpoint from a man whose 
whole life has been devoted to beauty. It 
seemed to me the strangest paradox. ... A 
roadside inn in the United States is a good 
place for the study of psychology and social 
habits in America. One custom which hap- 
pens here during winter and summer evenings 
is a local dance given by some inhabitant of 
the neighborhood who finds more spacious- 
ness here for a party of guests than in his 
own homestead. The rugs and chairs are 
put away, and the floor is polished for danc- 
ing. Outside, the inn is decorated with 
colored lamps and lanterns, and a bright 
light streams through the leaded window- 
panes across the road from New York. The 
metal of many machines sparkles in the 
shadow world beyond the lanterns. Through 
the open windows, if the night is mild, comes 
the ragtime music of a string band and the 
sound of women's laughter. Sometimes queer 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

figures, like ghosts of history, pass through 
the swing-doors, for it is a fancy-dress dance 
in the inn, and there is a glimpse of Colum- 
bine in her fluffy white skirt, with long white 
stockings, and with her hand on the arm of a 
tall young Pierrot; while a lady of the court 
of Marie Antoinette trips beside the figure of 
a scarlet Devil, and a little Puritan girl of 
New England (two hundred years ago) passes 
in with Monsieur Beaucaire in his white- 
satin coat and flowered waistcoat and silk 
stockings above buckled shoes. I like the 
idea and the customs of the roadside inn, for 
it helps to make human society sweet and 
friendly in villages beyond the glare of 
America's great cities. 

To study a people, however, one must see 
them in their homes, and I was fortunate in 
having friends who took me into their home 
life. When I went there it was at a time 
when American homes were excited and happy 
after the armistice, and when the soldiers 
who had been "over there" were coming 
back, with victory and honor. In many 
homes of the United States, scattered far and 
wide, there was not happiness, but sorrow, 
because in the victory march down Fifth 
Avenue there would be for some of the on- 

85 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

lookers one figure missing — the figure of 
some college boy who had gone marching 
away with smiling eyes and a stiff upper lip, 
or the figure of some middle-aged fellow who 
waved his hand to a group of small children 
and one woman who turned to hide her 
tears. There were empty chairs in the home- 
steads of the United States, and empty 
hearts on Armistice Day — and afterward. 
But I did not see them, and I thought of the 
many homes in England desolated by the 
appalling sacrifice of youth, so that in every 
town, and in every street, there are houses 
out of which all hope in life has gone, leaving 
behind a dreadful dreariness, an incurable 
loneliness, mocking at Victory. There was 
one home I went to where a mother of cheery 
babes waited for her man with an eager joy 
she did not try to hide. The smallest babe 
had been born while he was away, a boy 
baby with the gift of laughter from the 
fairy godmother; and there was great excite- 
ment at the thought of the first interview 
between father and son. All the community 
in the neighborhood of this house in West- 
chester County took a personal interest in 
this meeting when "the Major" should see 
his latest born, and when the wife should 

86 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

meet her man again. Tliey had kept his 
memory green and had cheered up the lone- 
liness of his wife by making a rendezvous of 
his house. She had played up wonderfully, 
with a pluck that never failed, and a spirit of 
comradeship to all her husband's friends, 
especially if he wore khaki and was far from 
his own folk. One was always certain of 
meeting a merry crowd at cocktail time. 
With some ceremony a party of friends were 
conducted to the cellar to see how a careful 
housewife with a hospitable husband got 
ahead of prohibition. . . . Then the Major 
came back, a little overwhelmed by the 
warmth of his greeting from old friends, a 
little dazed by the sharp contrast between 
war and peace, moved to his depths by the 
first sight of Peter, his boy baby. One day 
at dinner he described how he had heard the 
news of Peter in the war zone. He bought 
a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event 
— it was the only bottle to be had for love 
or money — and went round to the mess to 
call a toast. There were many officers, and 
the champagne did not give them full glasses, 
but in a sparkling drop or two they drank 
to the son of this good officer and good com- 
rade. I was glad to get a glimpse of that 

7 87 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

American home and of the two small girls 
in it, who had the habit, which I find pleasant 
among the children of America, of dropping a 
bob courtesy to any grown-up visitor. The 
children of America have the qualities of 
their nation, simplicity, common sense, and 
self-reliance. They are not so bashful as 
English boys and girls, and they are free 
from the little constraints of nursery eti- 
quette which make so many English children 
afraid to open their mouths. They are also 
free entirely from that juvenile snobbishness 
which is still cultivated in English society, 
where boys and girls of well-to-do parents 
are taught to look down with contempt upon 
children of the poorer classes. I sat down at 
table many mornings with a small boy and 
girl who were representative, I have no doubt, 
of Young America in the making. The boy, 
Dick, had an insatiable curiosity about the 
way things work in the world, and about the 
make-up of the world itself. To satisfy that 
curiosity he searched the Childreri's Booh of 
Knowledge^ the encyclopedias in the library, 
and the brain of any likely person, such as 
the Irish chauffeur and gardener, for scraps 
of useful information. In games of ''twenty 
questions," played across the luncheon-table, 

88 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

he chose mountains In Asia, or rivers in 
Africa, or parts of complicated engines, put- 
ting the company to shame by their igno- 
rance of geography and mechanics. For 
sheer personal pleasure he worked out sums 
in arithmetic when he wakened early in the 
morning. His ambition is to be an engineer, 
and he is already designing monster air- 
planes, and electrical machines of fantastic 
purpose — like, I suppose, millions of other 
small boys in America. The girl, aged eight, 
seemed to me the miniature represenLative 
of all American girlhood, and for that reason 
is a source of apprehension to her mother, 
who has to camouflage her amusement at 
this mite's audacity, and looks forward with 
a thrill of anxiety and delight to the time 
when Joan will put her hair up and play hell 
with boys' hearts. Joan has big, wondering 
eyes, which she already uses for cajolery and 
blandishment. Joan has a sense of humor 
which is alarming in an elf of her size. Joan 
can tell the most almighty "whoppers," with 
an air of innocence which would deceive an 
angel. Joan has a passionate temper when 
tliwarted of her will, a haughty arrogance of 
demeanor before which grown men quail, 
and a warm-hearted affection for people who 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

please her which exacts forgiveness of all 
naughtiness. She dances for sheer J03' of 
life, lives in imagination with fairies, screams 
with desire at the sight of glittering jewels 
and fine feathers, and weeps passionately at 
times because she is not old enough to go 
with her mother to dinner in New York. 
In another ten years, when she goes to col- 
lege, there will be the deuce of a row in her 
rooms, and three years later New York will 
be invaded by a pair of hazel eyes which will 
complicate, still further, the adventure of 
life east and west of Fifth Avenue. Those 
two young people go forth to school every 
morning, from a country house in Connecti- 
cut, in a "flivver" driven by the Irish chauf- 
feur, with whom they are the best of friends. 
Now and again they are allowed the use of 
the Cadillac car and spread themselves under 
the rugs with an air of luxury and arrogance, 
redeemed by a wink from Dick, as though to 
say, "What a game — this life!" and a sweep 
of Joan's eyelashes conveying the information 
that a princess of the United States is about 
to attend the educational establishment 
which she is pleased to honor with her pres- 
ence, and where she hopes to be extremely 
naughty to-day, just to make things hum. 

90 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

This boy and girl are good and close com- 
rades between the times they pull each 
other's hair, and have a profound respect for 
each other in spite of an intimate knowledge 
of their respective frailties and sinfulness. 
Joan knows that Dick invariably gets his 
sums right, whereas she invariably gets them 
wrong. She knows that his truthfulness is 
impregnable and painful in its deadly accu- 
racy. She knows that his character is as 
solid as a rock and that he is patient up to 
the point when by exasperation she asks for 
a bang on the head, and gets it. Dick knows 
that Joan is more subtle in imagination than 
he can ever hope to be, and that she can 
twist him round her little finger when she sets 
out deliberately thereto, in order to get the 
first use of the new toy which came to him on 
his birthday, the pencil which he has just 
sharpened for his own drawing, or the pic- 
ture-book which he has just had as a school 
prize. "You know mother says you mustn't 
be so terrible selfish," says Joan, in answer 
to violent protests, and Dick knows that he 
must pay the price of peace. He also loiows 
that Joan loves him devotedly, pines for him 
when he is away even for a little while, and 
admires his knowledge and efficiency with 

91 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

undisguised hero-worship, except when she 
wants to queen it over him, for the sake of his 
soul. I think of them in a little white house 
perched on flower-covered rocks, within 
sight of the Sound through a screen of birch 
trees. Inside the house there are some choice 
old bits of English and Italian furniture bought 
by a lady who knows the real from the false, 
and has a fine eye for the color of her hangings 
and her chintz-covered chairs. On cool nights 
a log fire burns in a wide hearth, and the elec- 
tric lamps are turned out to show the soft light 
of tall fat candles in wrought-iron torches each 
side of the hearthstone. Galli-Curci sings 
from a gramophone between Hawaiian airs or 
the latest ragtime; or the master of the house 
— a man of all the talents and the heart of 
youth — strikes out plaintive little melodies 
made up *'out of his own head," as children 
say, on a rosewood piano, while the two chil- 
dren play "Pollyanna" on the carpet, and 
their mother watches through half -shut eyes 
the picture she has made of the room. It is 
a pretty picture of an American interior, as 
a painter might see it. . . . 

In New York, as in London, it is the am- 
bition of many people, I find, to seek out a 
country cottage and get back to the "simple 

92 



\ 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

life" for a spell. "A real old place" is the 
dream of the American business man who has 
learned to love ancient things after a visit 
to Europe, or by a sudden revolt against 
the modern side of civilization. The "real 
old place" is not easy to find, but I met one 
couple who had found it not more than 
thirty miles or so from Madison Square, yet 
in such a rural and unfrequented spot that 
it seemed a world away. They had dis- 
covered an old mill-house, built more than a 
hundred and fifty years ago, and unchanged 
all that time except by the weathering of its 
beams and panels, and the sinking of its 
brick floors, and the memories that are 
stored up in every crack and crevice of that 
homestead where simple folk wed and bred, 
worked and died, from one generation to 
another. The new owners are simple folk, 
too, though not of the peasant class, and 
with reverence and sound taste they decline 
to allow any architect to alter the old struc- 
ture of the house, but keep it just as it 
stands. In their courtyard, on a Sunday 
afternoon, were several motor-cars, and in 
their parlor a party of friends from New 
York who had come out to this little old mill- 
house in the country, and expressed their 

93 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

ecstasy at its quaint simplicity. Some of 
them invited themselves to supper, whereat 
the lady of the mill-house laughed at them 
and said, "I guess you'll have to be content 
with boiled beans and salad, because my 
man and I are tired of the fatted calf and 
all the gross things of city life." To her sur- 
prise there was a chorus of "Fine!" and the 
daintiest girl from New York offered to do 
the washing-up. Through an open door in 
the parlor there was a pretty view of another 
room up a flight of wooden stairs. In such a 
room one might see the buxom ghost of 
some American Phoebe of the farm, with 
bare arms and a low-necked bodice, coiling 
her hair at an old mirror for the time when 
John should come a-courting after he had 
brushed the straw from his hair. . . . 

I went into another country cottage, as 
old as this one and as simple as this. It 
stands in a meadow somewhere in Sleepy 
Hollow, low lying by a little stream that 
flows through its garden, but within quick 
reach, by a stiff climb, through silver beeches 
and bracken, and over gray rocks that crop 
through the soil, to hilltops from which one 
gazes over the Hudson River and the Sound, 
and a wide stretch of wooded country with 

94 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

little white towns in the valleys. Here in 
the cottage lives a New York doctor and his 
wife, leading the simple life, not as a pose, 
but in utter sincerity, because they have 
simplicity in their souls. Every morning the 
doctor walks away from his cottage to a rail- 
way which takes him off to the noisy city, 
and here until five of the evening he is busy 
in healing the sufferers of civilization and 
stupidity — the people who overeat them- 
selves, the children who are too richly fed by 
foolish mothers, business men whose nerves 
have broken down by worry and work for 
the sake of ambition, society women wrecked 
in the chase of pleasure, and little ones, 
rickety, blind, or diseased because of the sins 
of their parents. The little doctor does not 
deal in medicine and does not believe in it. 
He treats his patients according to his 
philosophy of natural science, by which he 
gives their human nature a chance of freeing 
itself from the poison that has tainted it and 
getting back to normal self-healing action. 
He has devised a machine for playing waves 
of electricity through his patients by means 
of which he breaks up the clogging tissue of 
death in their cell life and regenerates the 
health of the cell system. He has made 

95 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

some startling cures, and I think the cheerful 
wisdom of the httle man, his simple, childlike 
heart, and the clean faith that shines out of 
his eyes are part of the secret of his power. 
He goes back to his country cottage to tend 
his flowers and to think deeper into the 
science of life up there on the hilltop which 
looks across the Sound among the silvery 
beeches, where in the spring there is a carpet 
of bluebells and in the autumn the fire of 
red bracken. In spring and summer and 
autumn he rises early and plunges into a pool 
behind the shelter of trees and bushes, and 
before dressing runs up and down a stone 
pathway bordered by the flowers he has 
grown, and after that dances a little to keep 
his spirit young. ... I liked that glimpse I had 
of the American doctor in Sleepy Hollow. 

And I liked all the glimpses I had of Ameri- 
can home life in the suburbs of New York 
and in other townships of the United States. 
I liked the white woodwork of the houses, 
and the bright sunlight that swept the sky 
above them, and the gardens that grew 
without hedges. I liked the good nature of 
the people, the healthiness of their outlook 
on life, their hopefulness in the future, their 
self-reliance and their sincerity of speech. I 

96 




I LIKED THE GREETING OF THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR 



THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 

liked the children of America, and the college 
girls who strolled in groups along the lanes, 
and the crowds who assembled in the morning 
at the local station to begin a new day's 
work or a new day's shopping in the big city 
at their journey's end. They had a keen and 
vital look, and nodded to one another in a 
neighborly way as they bought bulky papers 
from the bookstall and chewing-gum from 
the candy stall and had their shoes shined 
with one eye on the ticket office. I liked the 
greeting of the train conductor to all those 
people whose faces he knew as familiar 
friends, and to whom he passed the time o' 
day with a jesting word or two. I liked the 
social life of the American middle classes, 
because it is based, for the most part, on 
honesty, a kindly feeling toward manldnd, 
and healthiness of mind and body. They 
are not out to make trouble in the world, and 
unless somebody asks for it very badly they 
are not inclined to interfere with other 
people's business*. The thing I liked best in 
the United States is the belief of its citizens 
in the progress of mankind toward higher 
ideals of conmion sense; and after the mad- 
ness of a world at war it is good to find such 
faith, however difficult to believe. 

97 



IV 

America's new place in the world 

THE United States of America has a 
new meaning in the world, and has 
entered, by no desire of its own, into the 
great family of nations, as a rich uncle whose 
authority and temper must be respected by 
those who desire his influence in their family 
quarrels, difficulties, and conditions of life. 
Before the war the United States was won- 
derfully aloof from the peoples of Europe. 
The three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean 
made it seem enormously far away, and 
quite beyond the orbit of those passionate 
politics which stirred European communi- 
ties with Old World hatred and modern 
rivalries. It was free from the fear which 
was at the back of all European diplomacy 
and international intrigue — the fear of great 
standing armies across artificial frontiers, 
the fear of invasion, the fear of a modern 
European war in which nation against na- 
tion would be at one another's throats, in a 

98 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

wild struggle for self-preservation. America 
was still the New World, far away, to which 
people went in a spirit of adventure, in 
search of fortune and liberty. There was a 
chance of one, a certainty of the other, and 
it was this certain gift which called to multi- 
tudes of men and women — Russians and 
Russian Jews, Poles and Polish Jews, Czechs, 
and Bohemians, and Germans of all kinds — 
to escape from the bondage which cramped 
their souls under the oppression of their own 
governments, and to gain the freedom of the 
Stars and Stripes. To the popular imagina- 
tion of Europe, America was the world's 
democratic paradise, where every man had 
equal opportunity and rights, a living wage 
with a fair margin and the possibility of 
enormous luck. A steady stream of youth 
flowed out from Ireland to New York, year 
after year, and Irish peasants left behind in 
their hovels heard of great doings by Pat 
and Mick, who had become the gentlemen 
entirely out there in the States, and of Kath- 
leen and Biddy, who were piling up the dol- 
lars so fast that they could send some back 
to the old people and not feel the loss of them 
at all, at all. 

The internal resources of America were so 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

vast and the development of their own states 
so absorbed the energies of the people that 
there was no need of international diplomacy 
and intrigue to capture new markets of the 
world or to gain new territory for the pos- 
session of raw material. The United States 
was self-centered and self-sufficient, and the 
spirit of the Monroe Doctrine prohibiting 
foreign powers from any colonizing within 
the boundaries of the Republic was developed 
in popular imagination and tradition to a 
firm policy of self-isolation and of non-inter- 
ference by others. The American people 
had no interest, politically, in the govern- 
ments or affairs of other nations, and they 
desired to be left alone, with a *' Hands off!" 
their own sovereign power. It was this 
reality of isolation which gave America im- 
mense advantages as a republic and had a 
profound influence upon the psychology of 
her citizens. Being aloof from the tradi- 
tions of European peoples and from their 
political entanglements and interdependence, 
the United States could adopt a clear and 
straightforward policy of self-development 
on industrial lines. Her diplomacy'' was as 
simple as a cliild's copj^-book maxim. Her 
ambassadors and ministers at European 

100 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

courts had no need of casuistry or Machia- 
vellian subtlety. They had an exceedingly 
interesting and pleasant time reporting back 
the absurdities of European embassies, the 
melodrama of European rivalries, the back- 
stairs influence at work in secret treaties, the 
assassinations, riots, revolutions, and po- 
litical crises which from time to time con- 
vulsed various countries — and the corrupt 
bargainings and jugglings between small 
powers and great powers. The American 
representatives in Europe watched all this as 
the greatest game on earth, but far away 
from the United States, and without the 
slightest effect upon the destiny of their own 
country, except when it excited Wall Street 
gamblers. American diplomats were not 
weighted down by the fear of offending the 
susceptibilities of Germany or France or 
Italy or Russia, nor were they asked to play 
off one country against another, in order to 
maintain that delicate and evil mechanism 
known as *'the balance of power" — the 
uniting of armed bands for self-defense or 
the means of aggression. The frontiers of 
America were inviolate and the Atlantic and 
Pacific seaboards were not open to sudden 
attack, like the boundaries between Germany 

101 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

and France, Turkey and Bulgaria, Italy and 
Austria, where fear of invasion was the under- 
current of all political and popular thought, 
and the motive power of all national energy, 
to the detriment of social progress, because 
of the crippling cost of standing armies and 
unproductive labor for the material of war. 
Nationally, therefore, the United States of 
America was in supreme luck because it 
could use its youth and resources with full 
advantage, free from menace and beyond 
all rivalry. 

The character of the people responded to 
this independence of the Republic. The 
average American citizen, as far as I knew 
him, in Europe before the war, had an amused 
contempt for many institutions and social 
ideas which he observed in a continental 
tour. He was able to regard the hotchpotch 
of European nationalities and traditions from 
an aloof and judicial viewpoint. They seemed 
to him on the whole very silly. He could not 
understand why an invisible line on a road 
should make people on each side of the line 
hate each other desperately. He watched 
the march past of troops in France or Ger- 
many, the saluting of generals, the clicking 
of heels, the brilliant uniforms of officers, as 

102 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

a pageant which was utterly out of date in 
its appHcation to life, and as a degradation of 
individual dignity. He did not link up the 
thriftiness of the French peasant — the des- 
perate hoarding of his yetit sou — with the old 
fear of invasion by German legions across the 
frontier, when the peasant might see his 
little farm in flames and his harvest trampled 
down by soldiers' boots. The American vis- 
itor observed the fuss made when one king 
visited another, and read the false adulation 
of the royal visitor, the insincere speeches at 
royal banquets, the list of decorations con- 
ferred upon court flunkies, and laughed at 
the whole absurdity, not seeing that it was 
all part of a bid for a new alliance or a bribe 
for peace, or a mask of fear, until the time 
came when all bids and bribes should be of 
no more avail, and the only masks worn 
were to be gas-masks, when the rival nations 
should hack at one another in a frenzy of 
slaughter. The American in Europe who 
came to have a look 'round was astonished 
at the old-fashioned ways of people — their 
subservience to "caste" ideas, their alle- 
giance to the divine right of kings, as to the 
"Little Father" of the Russian people, and 
the "shining armor" of the German Kaiser, 

8 103 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

and their apparent contentment with the 
wide gulf betw^een underpaid labor and 
privileged capital. He did not realize that 
his own liberty of ideas and high rate of 
wage-earning were due to citizenship in a 
country free from militarism and its crushing 
taxation, and free also from hereditary cus- 
toms upheld by the powder of the sword used 
in civil strife as well as in international con- 
jflict, by the imperial governments of Russia, 
Germany, and other powers whose social 
philosophy was no different, though less 
tyrannical in expression. The American said, 
"I like Europe as a peep-show, and it's a 
good place to spend money in; but we can 
teach you a few things in the United States; 
one of them is equality, and another is oppor- 
tunity." He was right, and it was his luck. 
Because of those privileges many pilgrims 
of fortune went to America from all the 
countries of Europe, in a great tide of emi- 
gration, adopting American citizenship in 
most cases soon after sighting the Statue of 
Liberty — "old Lib.," as I heard her called. 
The United States received these foreigners 
in hundreds of thousands and became "the 
melting-pot" of races. The melting proc- 
ess, however, was not so rapid as some 

104 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

people Imagined, and it was something of a 
shock to the States to discover a few years 
before the war, and with a deeper realization 
at the outbreak of war, that they had within 
their boundaries enormous populations of 
foreign-born citizens, Germans, Poles, Slavs 
of all kinds, Italians, and Austrians, who had 
not assimilated American ideas, but kept 
their speech, customs, and national senti- 
ment. It was the vast foreign element which 
had to be converted to the American out- 
look upon the world tragedy which opened 
in August, 1914. This mass of hostile or 
unwilling people had to be dragged into ac- 
tion when America found that her isolation 
was broken, that she could no longer stand 
aloof from the rest of mankind, nor be 
indifferent to the fate of friendly nations 
menaced with destruction, nor endure a 
series of outrages which flouted her own 
power, nor risk the world supremacy of a 
military autocracy which, if triumphant in 
Europe, would very soon dictate to the 
United States. It is the miracle of the Stars 
and Stripes that when the American govern- 
ment conscripted all able-bodied youth and 
raised a vast and well-trained army, and sent 
it into the battlefields of France and 

105 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Flanders, there was no civil outbreak among 
those foreign-born citizens, and with abso- 
lute obedience they took their places in the 
ranks, Germans to fight against their own 
flesh and blood, because of allegiance to a 
state which had given them liberty, pro- 
vided they defended the ideals which be- 
longed to the state — in this case the hardest 
test of loyalty, not without tragedy and 
agony and fear. 

For the first time there was no liberty in 
the United States — no liberty of private 
judgment, no liberty of action, no liberty of 
speech. The state ruled with complete des- 
potism over the lives of its citizens, not 
tolerating any infringements of its orders, 
because the safety of the state would be 
endangered unless victory were assured. 
That was an enormous shock, I am sure, to 
the psychology of all Americans, even to 
those most loyal to the state authority, and 
it has caused an entire change in the mental 
attitude of all American citizens toward the 
conditions and relationships of life, because 
that sense of utter liberty they had before 
the war is limited now by the knowledge 
that at any time the Republic of which they 
are citizens may call upon them for life itself 

106 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

and for all service up to that of death, and 
that, whatever their ideas should be, they 
may not refuse. In that way they have no 
longer an advantage over Frenchmen, or 
Germans, or Russians, or Italians, whom 
they pitied as men without liberty of souls 
or bodies. That is to say, they have to 
make surrender to the state of all things in 
the last resort, w^hich is war — a law which 
many European peoples learned to their cost, 
many times before, and which America 
learned once in her own Civil War, but 
thought she could forget with other painful 
old things in the lumber-room of history. 

The people of the United States have 
learned many other things during the last 
few years, when all the world has changed, 
and they stand now at the parting of the 
ways, looking back on the things they knew 
which they will never see again, and looking 
forward to the future, which is still doubtful 
to them in its destiny. I went to them on a 
visit during the period between armistice 
and peace, when mentally, I think, they 
were in a transition stage, very conscious of 
this place at the crossroads, and filled with 
grave anxiety, in spite of exultation at the 
power of their armies and the valor of their 

107 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

men who had helped to gain stupendous 
victory. 

The things that had happened within the 
United States before and after its declara- 
tion of war had stirred them with passionate 
and compHcated emotions. From the very 
outset of the Great War, long before the 
United States was directly involved, large 
numbers of Americans of the old stock, born 
of English, Irish, Scottish, or Dutch ances- 
try, were neutral only by order and not at 
all in spirit. Their sentiment toward France, 
based on the Lafayette tradition and their 
love of Paris and of French literature and 
wit, made them hate the invasion of northern 
France and eager to act as champions of the 
French people. Their old ties with England, 
the bond of speech and of blood, made them 
put aside any minor antagonisms which 
they had felt on account of old prejudice, 
and they followed with deep sympathy and 
anxiety the progress of the heroic struggle of 
British armies in the slaughter-fields. They 
were impatient for America to get into the 
conflict against German aggression. As the 
Germans became more ruthless of humane 
laws, more desperate in their attacks upon 
non-combatant as well as military popula- 

108 



AMERICA S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

tions by sea and air and land, these Ameri- 
cans became sick and fevered at the thought 
of their own neutraHty, and supported 
Colonel Roosevelt in his driving influence to 
get the United States into the war. They 
became more and more embittered with 
President Wilson, who adopted an academic 
view of the jungle scenes in Europe, disso- 
ciated the German people from the crimes of 
their war lords, and expounded a Christian 
philosophy of world politics which seemed 
like cowardice and humiliation of American 
pride to people stung to fury by German 
insults and outrages. These thoughts were 
beginning to seethe like yeast throughout 
masses of American people, especially in the 
East, but took a long time to reach and stir 
the great West and were resisted by the 
mentality of foreign-born populations, in- 
cluding the Jewish communities and the 
Irish. They were averse to war, and took a 
detached view of the struggle in Europe, 
which seemed to them too far away to matter 
to America. The German populations had a 
natural sympathy for their own race, much 
as some of them detested its militaristic 
ideals. There were, I imagine, also many 
intellectual men, not dragged down by the 

109 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

apathy of the masses, to whom "the war" 
seemed of less importance to the United 
States than the condition of the crops or the 
local baseball match. They felt that Presi- 
dent Wilson's hesitations, long-drawn-out 
notes, and exalted pacifism were on nobler 
lines of thought than the loud-mouthed 
jingoism and bloodthirsty bowlings of low- 
class newspapers and speakers. 

The Lusitania was sunk, and a cry of 
agony and wrath went up from many hearts 
in the world at this new phase of war; but 
still the United States stayed out ; and manj^ 
Americans lowered their heads with shame 
and had a fire of indignation in their hearts 
because their President still temporized. 
They believed that the American people 
would have rallied to him as one man had he 
made that outrage the signal of war. Thej^ 
had no patience with his careful letter- 
writing, his anxiety to act as a moral mentor 
instead of as a leader of great armies in a 
fight against Avorld criminals. ... At last 
Wilson was forced to act, even his caution 
being overmastered by the urgent necessit}' 
of intervention on behalf of Great Britain 
and France and Belgium, panting and bleed- 
ing from every pore after three years of 

110 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

struggle; even his philosophy of aloofness 
being borne down by acts of war which 
wounded American interests and threatened 
American security. So the United States 
declared war, gathered its youth into great 
training-camps, and launched into the world 
struggle with slow but ever-increasing energy 
which swept the people with a mighty whirl- 
wind of emotion. 

The American people as a whole did truly 
enter into war in the spirit of crusaders. 
They sent out their sons as rescuers of 
stricken peoples fighting desperately against 
criminal powers. They had no selfish in- 
terests behind their sacrifice, and they did 
not understand that defeat of the nations 
allied against Germany would inevitably 
menace them with dire perils to their sover- 
eign power, to their commercial prosperity, 
and to their ideals of civilization. Those 
things were true, but it was not because of 
them that the people of the United States 
were uplifted by a wonderful exaltation and 
that they put their full strength into pre- 
paring themselves for a long and bloody war. 
Every little home was turned into a Red 
Cross factory. Every young man of pluck 

and pride was eager to get the first call for 

111 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

active service in the field. Girls took on 
men's jobs, old ladies knitted until tlieir eyes 
were dim. Hard business men gave away 
their dollars in bundles, denied themselves 
at meal-time so that Europe should be fed, 
tried by some little sacrifice to share the 
spirit of those who made offer of their lives. 
The materialism of which America had been 
accused, not unjustly, was broken through 
by a spiritual idealism which touched every 
class, and Americans did not shrink from 
sacrifice, but asked for it as a privilege, and 
were regretful that as a people they suffered 
so little in comparison with those who had 
fought and agonized so long. . . . 

All this I heard when I went to America 
in the spring, between armistice and peace, 
and with my own eyes and ears I saw and 
heard the proof of it. Down Fifth Avenue I 
saw the march past of troops whom I had 
seen before marching along the roads of war 
to Ypres and Amiens, when the British army 
was hard pressed and glad to see these new- 
comers. In New York clubs I met young 
American officers who had been training with 
British staffs and battalions before they 
fought alongside British troops. And in 
American homes I met women who were still 

112 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

waiting for their men whom they had sent 
away with brave faces, hiding the fear in 
their hearts, and now knew, with thanlvful- 
ness, that they were safe. Victory had come 
quickly after the entry of the American 
troops, but it was only the low braggart who 
said, *'We won the war — arid taught the 
English how to fight." The main body of 
educated people whom I met in many Ameri- 
can cities said, rather: "We were the last 
straw that broke the camel's back. We 
were glad to share the victory, but we did 
not suffer enough. We came in too late to 
take our full share of sacrifice." 

At that time, after the armistice and when 
Mr. Wilson was in Europe at the Peace Con- 
ference, the people I met were not so much 
buoyed up with the sense of victory as per- 
plexed and anxious about the new respon- 
sibilities which they would be asked to ful- 
fill. A tremendous controversy raged round 
the President, who bafiled them by his acts 
and speeches and silences. When in an 
article which I wrote soon after my landing I 
said I was "all for Wilson" I received an 
immense number of letters "putting me 
wise" as to the failure of the President to 
gain the confidence of the American people 

113 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

and their grievous apprehensions that he 
was, out of personal vanity and with a stub- 
born, autocratic spirit, bartering away the 
rights and Hberties of the United States, 
without the knowledge or support of the 
people, and involving them in European en- 
tanglements which they were not prepared 
to accept. This antagonism to the President 
was summed up clearly enough in some such 
words as those that follow: 

Taft and Roosevelt quarreled ; Wilson was born of it. 
Wilson is all there is to the Democratic party. He 
has had to dominate it; the brain of America is in the 
Republican camp. He refused to use this material 
when offered for the war. He would not allow Roose- 
velt to go to France and fight; he would not use 
General Wood, who was the "Lord Bobs" of this 
country in regard to preparedness. For the winning 
of the war we put party aside and the Congress gave 
Wilson unlimited power, (Lincoln put party aside 
and used the best he could get.) Now Mr. Wilson 
asks and gets very little advice. When he has a 
difficult question he secludes himself, except for 
Colonel House — and we know nothing about Colonel 
House. Mr. Wilson dominated America and no one 
objected; the war was being won. In the fall he 
saw, of course, victory, and was planning his trip 
abroad. He boldly asked for a Democratic Senate, 
which would give him control of the treaty-making 
power. He said, practically: "Everybody shows 
himself bigger than party. I will, too. All together 
now! But you prove it and give me a party Senate, 

114 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

not a Senate picked from the best brains of this 
America, but a Democratic Senate, so that I can have 
full power in the Peace Conference." The laugh 
that went up must have hit the stars, and we almost 
forgot the war to watch the election. Can you 
imagine Roosevelt in New York in this crisis? He 
held a monster meeting and said what he thought, 
through his teeth. "Unconditional surrender for 
Germany, no matter what it costs" (not idle words — 
Quentin's death in France had cost Roosevelt his 
famous boyishness of spirit), "and a Senate that will 
curb autocratic power in America." Then he told 
his hearers that they would not need a key to under- 
stand his speech. Now, power goes to people's 
heads. Mr. Wilson had changed. Time and again 
opposition in Congress failed. You would hear, 
"Wilson always wins." Always a dominating figure, 
he grew defiant, a trifle ruthless, heady. The Ameri- 
can answer to Wilson was a Republican Senate, and 
the Senators were put there to balance him. When 
he decided to go to Europe he simply said he was 
going. He did not ask our approval, nor find out 
our wishes, nor even tell us what he was going to say, 
but did take over the cables and put them under 
government control. He made himself so inacces- 
sible at that time that no one could get his ear. On 
his flying visit to New York he said that he returned 
to France to tell them that we backed him. Is that 
true.'* We don't know what we think yet. We 
haven't made up our minds. We will back him when 
he is frank and when we are convinced. We can't 
sign our souls away, all our wonderful heritages, 
without knowing all about it. . . . If we join a League 
of. Nations, shall we prevent war? Or, if we join, 
shall we be absorbed and make the fight a bigger 
one? 

115 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

This, I believe, is a fair statement of the 
views held by many educated people in the 
United States at the time between armistice 
and peace. I heard just such words in the 
City Club of New York, in the Union League 
Club, from people in Boston and Philadel- 
phia and Washington, and at many dinner- 
tables where, after the preliminary courtesies 
of conversation, there was a quick clash of 
opinion among the guests, husbands differing 
from wives, brothers from sisters, and friends 
from friends, over the personality and pur- 
pose of the President, and the practical 
possibilities of a League of Nations. The de- 
fenders of the President waived aside all per- 
sonal issues and supported him ardently be- 
cause they believed that it was only by the 
application of his ideals, modified, no doubt, 
by contact with the actual problems of 
European states, that a new war more 
devastating to the world than the one just 
past could be prevented, and that his obsti- 
nacy and singleness of purpose on behalf of a 
League of Nations pointed him out as the 
Man of Destiny who would lead humanity 
out of the jungle to a higher plane of civilized 
philosophy. 

That was my own view of his mission and 

116 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

character, though now I think he failed at 
the Peace Conference in carrying out the 
principles of his own Fourteen Points, and 
weakened under the pressure of the govern- 
ing powers of France, Belgium, and England, 
who desired revenge as well as reparation, 
and the death of German militarism under 
the heel of an Allied militarism based on the 
old German philosophy of might. The Presi- 
dent failed largely because he insisted upon 
playing *'a lone hand,'* and did not have the 
confidence of his country behind him, nor its 
understanding of his purpose, while he him- 
self wavered in his principles. 

America, during the time of my visit, was 
afraid of taking too strong a lead in the re- 
settlement of Europe. So far from wishing 
to "boss the show," as some people sus- 
pected, most Americans had an unnatural 
timidity, and one count of their charge 
against Wilson was his obstinacy in his deal- 
ings with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. 
It was a consciousness of ignorance about 
European problems which made the Ameri- 
cans draw back from strong decisions, and 
above all it was the fear of being "dragged 
in" to new wars, not of their concern, which 
made them deeply suspicious of the League 

117 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

of Nations. In many conversations I found 
this fear the dominant thought. "If you 
people want to fight each other again, 
you will have to do without us," said 
American soldiers just back from the front. 
"No more crusades for us!" said others. 
"American isolation — and a plague on all 
your little nations!" said civilians as well as 
soldiers. Bitter memories of French "econ- 
omy" spoiled for American soldiers the ro- 
mance of the Lafayette tradition. "I lost 
my leg," said one man, "for a country which 
charged for the trenches where we fought, 
and for people who put up their prices three 
hundred per cent, when the American armies 
came to rescue them. France can go to hell 
as far as I'm concerned." . . . Nevertheless, it 
became more clear to thinking minds in 
America that the days of "isolation" were 
gone, and that for good or evil the United 
States is linked up by unbreakable bonds of 
interest and responsibility with other great 
powers of the world. Never again can she 
be indifferent to their fate. If another great 
convulsion happens in Europe, American 
troops will again be there, quicker than 
before, because her action in the last war and 
her share of the terms of peace have made her 

118 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

responsible in honor for the safety of certain 
peoples and the upholding of certain agree- 
ments. The Atlantic has shrunk in size to 
a narrow strip of water and the sky is a cor- 
ridor which will be quickly traversed by air- 
craft before the next great war. But these 
physical conditions which are changing by 
mechanical development, altering the time- 
tables of traffic, are of no account compared 
with the vast change that happened in the 
world when the Stars and Stripes fluttered in 
the fields of France and Flanders, when the 
bodies of America's heroic youth were laid 
to rest there under little white crosses, and 
when the United States of America entered 
into an intimate and enduring relationship 
with Great Britain and France. 

The effect of this change is not yet appar- 
ent in its fullness. America is still in a state 
of transition, watching, studying, thinking, 
feeling, and talking herself into convictions 
which will alter the fate of the world. I be- 
lieve with all my heart and soul that Amer- 
ica's closer relationship with Europe will be 
all the better for Europe. I believe that the 
spirit of the American people is essentially 
and unalterably democratic, and that as far 
as their power goes it will be used against the 

9 119 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

tyranny of military castes and attempted op- 
pression of peoples. I believe that the in- 
fluence of this spirit, visible to me in many 
people I met, will be of enormous benefit to 
England and France, because it will be used 
as an arbitrating factor in the conflict which 
is bound to come in both those countries 
between the old regime and the new. The 
influence of America will be the determining 
power in the settlement of Ireland on a basis 
of common sense free from the silly old 
fetishes of historical enmities on both sides. 
It will intervene to give a chance of life to 
the German race after they have paid the 
forfeit for their guilt in the last war, and will, 
I am certain, react against the stupid philos- 
ophy of enduring vengeance with its desire 
to make a slave-state in Central Europe, 
which still animates bloody-minded men and 
women so passionate of revenge that they 
are kindling the fires of another terrible and 
devastating war. The United States of 
America is bound up with the fate of Eu- 
rope, but its people will still remain rather 
aloof in mentality from the passions of 
European nations, and will be more judicial 
in their judgment because of that. In- 
stinctively, rather than intellectually, Amer- 

120 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

icans will act in behalf of democratic rights 
against autocratic plots. They will not 
allow the Russian people to be hounded back 
to the heels of grand dukes and under the 
lash of the knout. They will give their sup- 
port to the League of Nations not as a ma- 
chinery to stifle popular progress by a com- 
bination of governments, but as a court for 
the reform of international laws and the 
safeguarding of liberty. Europe will not be 
able to ignore the judgment of America. 
That country is, as I said, the rich uncle 
whose temper they must consult because of 
gratitude for favors to come — and because 
of wealth and power in the world's markets. 

America is at the threshold of her supreme *! 
destiny in the world. By her action in the ' 
war, when for the first time her strength was 
revealed as a mighty nation, full grown and 
conscious of power, she has attained the 
highest place among the peoples, and her will 
shall prevail if it is based upon justice and 
liberty. I believe that America's destiny 
will be glorious for mankind, not because I 
think that the individual American is a 
better, nobler, more spiritual being than the 
individual Englishman, Frenchman, or Rus- 
sian, but because I see, or think I see, that 

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PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

this great country is inspired more than any 
other nation among the big powers bj^ the 
united, organized quahties of simple, com- 
monplace people, with kindness of heart, 
independence of spirit, and sincerity of 
ideas, free from the old heritage of caste, 
snobbishness, militarism, and fetish-worship 
which still lingers among the Junkers of 
Europe. They are a middle-class empire, 
untainted by imperial ambition or ancient 
traditions of overlordship. They are gov- 
erned by middle-class sentiment. They put 
all problems of life to the test of that sim- 
plicity which is found in middle-class homes, 
where neither anarchy is welcome nor aristo- 
cratic privilege. America is tlie empire of 
the wage-earner, where even. her plutocrats 
have but little power over the independence 
of the people. It is a nation of nobodies 
great with the power of the common man 
and the plain sense that governs his way of 
jlife. Other nations are still ruled by their 
"somebodies" — by their pomposities and 
High Panjandrums. But it is the nobodies 
whose turn is coming in history, and America 
is on their side. In that great federation of 
United States I saw, even in a brief visit, 
possible dangers that may spoil America's 

122 



AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 

chance. I saw a luxury of wealth in New 
York and other cities which may be a vicious 
canker in the soul of the people. I saw a 
sullen discontent among wage-earners and 
home-coming soldiers because too many 
people had an unfair share of wealth. I met 
American Junkers who would use the mili- 
tary possibilities of the greatest army in the 
world for imperialistic adventures and world 
dominance. I heard of anarchy being whis- 
pered among foreign-born masses in Ameri- 
can cities and passed over to other laborers 
not of foreign origin. In the censorship of 
news I saw the first and most ominous sign 
of government autocracy desiring to work 
its will upon the people by keeping them in 
ignorance and warping their opinions; and 
now and then I was conscious of an intoler- 
ance of free thought which happened to 
conflict with popular sentiment, as ruthless 
as in Russia during Czardom. I saw hatred 
based on ignorance and the biiite, spirit of 
men inflamed by war. But these were only 
accidental things, to be found wherever hu- 
manity is crowded, and after my visit to 
America I came awaj^ with memories, which 
are still strong in my heart, of a people filled 
with vital energy, kind in heart, sincere and 

123 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

simple in their ways of thought and speech, 
ideahstic in emotion, practical in conduct, 
and democratic by faith and upbringing. 
The soil of America is clean and strong and 
free; and the power that comes out of it will, 
I think and hope and pray, be used to gain 
the liberties of other nations, and to help for- 
ward the welfare of the human family. 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

THE title I have chosen for this chapter is 
indiscreet, and, as some readers may 
think, misleading. At least it needs this 
explanation — that there is no absolute point 
of view in England about the United States. 
"England" does not think (a statement not 
intended to be humorous at the expense of 
my own people) any more than any nation 
may be said to think in a single unanimous 
way about any subject under the sun. Eng- 
land is a collection of individuals and groups 
of individuals, each with different points of 
view or shades of view, based upon certain 
ideals and knowledge, or upon passion, ig- 
norance, elementary common sense, or ele- 
mentary stupidity, like the United States 
and every country on earth. 

It would convey an utterly false impression 
to analyze and expound the opinions of one 
such class, or to give as a general truth a few 

im 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

individual opinions. One can only get at 
something like the truth by following the 
drift of current thought, by contrasting na- 
tional characteristics, and by striking a 
balance between extremes of thought. It is 
that which i propose to do in this chapter, 
frankly, and without fear of giving offense, 
because to my mind insincerity on a subject 
like this does more harm than good. 

I will not disguise, therefore, at the out- 
set, that after the armistice which followed 
the Great War huge numbers of people in 
England became annoyed, bitter, and un- 
friendly to the United States. The causes 
of that unkindness of sentiment were to some 
extent natural and inevitable, owing to the 
state of mind in England at that time. 
They had their foundations in the patriotism 
and emotion of a people who had just 
emerged from the crudest ordeal which had 
ever called to their endurance in history. 
When American soldiers, sailors, politicians, 
and patriots said, "Well, boys, we won the 
war!" which, in their enthusiasm for great 
achievements, they could hardly avoid say- 
ing at public banquets or welcomes home, 
where every word is not measured to the 
sensibilities of other people or to the exact 

126 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

truth, English folk were hurt. They were 
not only hurt, but they were angry. Moth- 
ers of boys m mean streets, or rural villages, 
or great mansions, reading these words in 
newspapers which gave them irritating prom- 
inence, said, "So they think that we did 
nothing in the years before they came to 
France!" and some mothers thought of the 
boys who had died in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 
and they hated the thought that Americans 
should claim the victory which so many Eng- 
lish, Scottish, Irish, Canadians, Australians, 
New-Zealanders, South-Africans, and French 
had gained most of all by long-suffering, 
immense sacrifice, and hideous losses. 

They did not know, though I for one tried 
to tell them, that all over the United States 
American people did not forget, even in their 
justified enthusiasm for the valor of their 
own men and the immense power they had 
prepared to hurl against the enemy, that 
France and England had borne the brunt of 
the war in the long years when Germany 
was at her strongest. 

A friend of mine — an English oflScer — was 
in a New York hotel on Armistice Night, 
when emotion and patriotic enthusiasm were 
high — and hot. A young American mounted 

127 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

a chair, waving the Stars and Stripes. He 
used the good old phrase: "Well, boys, we 
won the war! The enemy fell to pieces as 
soon as the doughboys came along. Eng- 
land and France could not do the trick with- 
out us. We taught 'em how to fight and how 
to win!" 

My friend smiled, sat tight, and said 
nothing. He remembered a million dead in 
British ranks, untold and unrecorded hero- 
ism, the first French victory of the Marne, 
the years of epic fighting when French and 
British troops had hurled themselves against 
the German lines and strained his war- 
machine. But it was Armistice Night, and 
in New York, and the "Yanks" had done 
jolly well, and they had a right to jubilation 
for their share in victory. Let the boy 
shout, and good luck to him. But an Amer- 
ican rose from his chair and pushed his way 
toward my friend. 

"I'm ashamed to hear such rant before 
British and French officers," he said, holding 
out his hand. "We know that our share is 
not as great as yours, within a thousand 
miles." 

Those w^ere chivalrous words. They rep- 
resented the conviction, I am sure, of mil- 

128 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

lions of Americans of tlie more thoughtful 
type, who would not allow themselves to be 
swept away beyond the just merits of their 
national achievements, even by the fervor 
of the moment. 

But in England people only knew the 
boast and not the modesty. Because some 
Americans claimed too much, the English of 
the lower and less intelligent classes belittled 
the real share of victory which belonged to 
America, and became resentful. It was so 
in France as in England. It was lamentable, 
but almost unavoidable, and when this re- 
sentment and this sullen denial of American 
victory became known in the United States, 
passed over the wires by newspaper cor- 
respondents, it naturally aroused counter- 
action, equal bitterness, and then we were in 
a vicious circle, abominable in its effect upon 
mutual understanding and liking. 

All that, however, was limited to the 
masses, for the most part certainly, and was 
only used as poison propaganda by the 
gutter press on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Educated people in both countries under- 
stood the folly and squalor of that stuff, and 
discounted it accordingly. 

What was more serious in its effect upon 

129 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the intelligent classes was the refusal of the 
Senate to ratify the Peace Treaty and its re- 
pudiation of President Wilson's authority. I 
have already dealt in previous writings with 
that aspect of affairs, and have tried to prove 
my understanding of the American view. 
But there is also an English view, which 
Americans should know and understand. 

At the time I am writing this chapter, and 
for some months previously, England has 
been irritated with the United States because 
of a sense of having been "let down" over 
the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations 
by American action. I think that irritation 
has been to some extent justified. When 
President Wilson came to London he re- 
ceived, as I have told elsewhere, the most 
enthusiastic and triumphant ovation that 
has ever been given to a foreign visitor by 
the population of that great old city. The 
cheers that rose in storms about him were 
shouted not only because his personality 
seemed to us then to have the biggest and 
most hopeful qualities of leadership in the 
world, but because he was, as we thought, 
the authorized representative of the United 
States, to whom, through him, we gave hom- 
age. It was only months afterward, when 

130 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

the Peace Treaty had been signed and when 
the League of Nations (Wilson's child) had 
been established, that we were told that 
Wilson was not the authorized representative 
of the United States, that the American Sen- 
ate did not recognize his authority to pledge 
the country to the terms of the treaty, and 
that the signature to the document was not 
worth ten cents. That made us look pretty 
foolish. It made France and Italy and other 
powers, who had yielded in many of their de- 
mands in order to satisfy President Wilson's 
principles, feel pretty mad. It made a laugh- 
ing-stock of the newborn League of Nations. 
It was the most severe blow to the prospects 
of world peace and reconstruction. In Eng- 
land, as I know, there were vast numbers of 
people who regarded the Peace Treaty as 
one of the most clumsy, illogical, and danger- 
ous documents ever drawn up by a body of 
diplomats. I am one of those who think so. 
But that has nothing to do with the refusal 
of the Senate to acknowledge Wilson's 
signature. 

The character of the clauses which created 
a series of international blunders leading in- 
evitably to new wars unless they are altered 
during the next decade was not the cause of 

131 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the Senate's "reservations." The American 
Senators did not seem to be worried about 
that aspect of the treaty. Their only worry 
was to safeguard the United States from any 
responsibiHty in Europe, and to protect their 
own traditional powers against an autocratic 
President. However right they may have 
been, it must at least be acknowledged by 
every broad-minded American that we in 
Europe were put completely "into the cart" 
by this action, and had some excuse for 
annoyance. All this is now past history, and 
no doubt before this book is published manj^ 
other things will have happened as a conse- 
quence of the events which followed so 
rapidly upon the Peace of Versailles, so that 
what I am now writing will read like his- 
torical reminiscence. But it will always re- 
main a painful chapter, and it will only be 
by mutual forbearance and the most deter- 
mined efforts of people of good will on both 
sides of the Atlantic that the growth of a 
most lamentable misunderstanding between 
our two peoples in consequence of those 
unfortunate episodes will be prevented. 

Another cause of popular discontent with 
the United States was the rather abrupt 
statement of Mr. Carter Glass, Secretary of 

132 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

the Treasury, that the United States would 
not grant any more loans to Europe so long 
as she failed to readjust her financial situa- 
tion by necessary taxation, economy, and 
production. 

The general (and in my opinion unjusti- 
fied) anger aroused by this statement was 
expressed by a cartoon in Punch called 
"Another Reservation." It was a picture 
of a very sinister-looking Uncle Sam turning 
his back upon a starving woman and child 
who appeal to his charity, and he says: 
"Very sad case. But I'm afraid she ain't 
trying." 

Mr. Punch is a formidable person in Eng- 
land, and by his barbed wit may destroy 
any public man or writing man who lays 
himself open to ridicule, but I ventured to 
risk that by denouncing the cartoon as un- 
just and unfair in spirit and fact. I pointed 
out that since the beginning of the war the 
United States had shown an immense, un- 
tiring, and inexhaustible generosity toward 
the suffering peoples of Europe, and reminded 
England how under Mr. Hoover's organiza- 
tion the American Relief Committee had 
fed the Belgian and French populations be- 
hind the German lines, and how afterward 

133 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

they had poured food into Poland, Serbia, 
Austria, and other starving countries. That 
challenge I made against Mr. Punch was 
supported by large numbers of English 
people who wrote to me expressing their 
agreement and their gratitude to America. 
They deplored the spirit of the cartoon and 
the evil nature of so many attacks in low- 
class journals of England against the United 
States, whose own gutter press was at the 
same time publishing most scurrilous abuse 
of us. But among the letters I received was 
one from an American lady which I will 
quote now, because it startled me at the 
time, and provides, in spite of its bitterness, 
some slight excuse for the criticism which 
was aroused in England at the time. If an 
American could feel like that, scourging her 
own people too much (as I think), it is more 
pardonable that English sentiment should 
have been a little ruffled by America's threat 
to abandon Europe. 

I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that the 
Punch cartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your 
kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never 
been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud 
to wear hiurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think 
the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely 
to do good. We have been given praise ad nauneam, 

134 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on 
that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that 
would silence any competitors. . . . 

I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars 
from Europe" had either their hats or their bags 
stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to 
the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one my- 
self. I went home in April, prouder of my country 
than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and 
painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputa- 
tion. I fear I found that people were not only tired 
of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impres- 
sions being so widely circulated in the press — that 
France had been guilty of every form of petty in- 
gratitude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in 
Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. 
A minority everywhere was struggling against the 
tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so se- 
curely counted on from my own people. But the 
collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, 
were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been 
turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York 
to California I heard the same tale — and, alas, ex- 
perienced it — people were tired of giving, tired of the 
war. In New York I was invited to speak before a 
well-known Women's Club — I was "a guest of 
honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and 
a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an 
immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to 
do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of 
a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the presi- 
dent. A contribution was taken up by a small group 
of women, all fashionably dressed, with pearl or 
"near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As 
there were between 200 and 300 women present in 
the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternly 
10 135 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

suggested that the president should announce the 
sum for which I should have to account, and her 
speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip 
I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium 
and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had 
the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the 
most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness. 

Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much 
stress is laid on our generosity and a false impres- 
sion has gone abroad — an impression nothing can 
ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was 
American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline 
how much of the fund came from Great Britain and 
Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered 
their touching little phrases of gratitude to the Ameri- 
cans, as I myself saw, on Canadian flour sacks. 
During the first year or so the contributions of Ameri- 
cans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth 
and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton 
a year after the war scourged us for our indifference 
even then, 

Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had 
contributed £35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, 
etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have 
tried to believe that my experience was due to some- 
thing lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly 
kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, 
dinners, teas — but they would not be induced to 
refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of 
them toward my cause. . . . 

I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like 
most Americans who have served abroad I feel we 
came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to 
clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the 
most wicked propaganda against our late allies- 
France as well as England. Personally, I realize 

136 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

that if we had contributed twenty times as much I 
should still not feel we had done enough. If you were 
not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never 
write as I have done, but just because you reach such 
an enormous public, because your influence is so great, 
I am anxious that America should not be given undue 
praise — which she does not herself credit — and that 
the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) 
should be printed clear for her to read and profit by. 

That is a sincere, painful, and beautiful 
letter, and I think it ought to be read in the 
United States, not because I indorse its 
charge against America's lack of generosity — 
I cannot do that — but because it exculpates 
England and France of unreasoning disap- 
pointment, and is also the cry of a generous 
American soul, moved by the sufferings of 
Europe, and eager that her people should 
help more, and not less, in the reconstruction 
of the world. The English people did not 
take her view that the Americans had not 
done enough or were tired of generosity. 
It must be admitted by those who followed 
our press that, apart from two gutter jour- 
nals, there was a full recognition of what the 
United States had done, and continual re- 
minders that no policy would be tolerated 
which did not have as its basis Anglo- 
American friendship. 

137 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

Upon quite another level of argument is 
the criticism of American psychology and 
political evolution expressed by various Eng- 
lish writers upon their return from visits to 
the United States, and a fairly close ac- 
quaintance with the character of American 
democracy as it was revealed during the war, 
and afterward. The judgment of these 
writers does not affect public opinion, be- 
cause it does not reach down to the masses. 
It is confined rather to the student type of 
mind, and probably has remained unnoticed 
by the average man and woman in the 
United States. It is, however, very in- 
teresting because it seeks to forecast the 
future of America as a world power and as a 
democracy. The chief charge leveled against 
the intellectual tendency of the United States 
may be summed up in one word, "intoler- 
ance." Men like George Bernard Shaw, 
J. A. Hobson, and H. W. Massingham do 
not find in their study of the American 
temperament or in the American form of gov- 
ernment the sense of liberty with which the 
people of the United States credit themselves, 
and with which all republican democracies 
are credited by the proletariat in European 
countries. 

138 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

They seem inclined to believe, indeed, 
that America has less liberty in the way of 
free opinion and free speech than the Eng- 
lish under their hereditary monarchy, and 
that the spirit of the people is harshly intoler- 
ant of minorities and nonconforming indi- 
viduals, or of any idea contrary to the general 
popular opinion of the times. Some of these 
critics see in the *' Statue of Liberty" in New 
York Harbor a figure of mockery behind 
which is individualism enchained by an 
autocratic oligarchy and trampled underfoot 
by the intolerance of the masses. They 
produce in proof of this not only the position 
of an American President, with greater power 
over the legislature than any constitutional 
king, but the mass violence of the majority 
in its refusal to admit any difference of 
opinion with regard to war aims during the 
time of war fever, and the tyrannical action 
of the Executive in its handling of labor 
disputes and industrial leaders, during and 
after the war. 

It is, I think, true that as soon as America 
entered the war there was no liberty of 
opinion allowed in the United States. There 
was no tolerance of "conscientious objectors " 
nor mercy toward people who from religious 

139 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

motives, or intellectual crankiness, were 
antagonistic to the use of armed might. 
People who did not subscribe to the Red 
Cross funds were marked down, I am told, 
dismissed from their posts, and socially 
ruined. Many episodes of that kind were 
reported, and startled the advanced radicals 
in England who had regarded the United 
States as the land of liberty. Americans 
may retort that we did not give gentle 
treatment to our own "conscientious ob- 
jectors," and that is true. Many of them 
were put into prison and roughly handled, 
but on the other hand there was a formal, 
though insincere, acknowledgment that even 
in time of war there should be liberty of 
conscience, and a clause to that effect was 
passed by Parliament. In spite also of the 
severity of censorship, and the martial law 
that was enforced by the Defense of the 
Realm Act, there was, I believe, a greater 
freedom of criticism allowed to the press 
than would have been tolerated by the 
United States. Periodicals like the Nation 
and the New Statesman, even newspapers 
like the Daily Mail and the Morning Post, 
indulged in violent criticism of the conduct of 
the war, the methods of the War Cabinet, 

140 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

the action and military policy of leaders like 
Lord Kitchener, and the failure of military 
campaigns in the Dardanelles and other 
places. No breath of criticism against Amer- 
ican leadership or generalship was admitted 
to the American press, and their war cor- 
respondents were censored with far greater 
severity than their English comrades, who 
were permitted to describe, very fully, re- 
verses as well as successes in the fields of 
war. 

What, however, has startled the advanced 
wing of English political thought more than 
all that is the ruthless way in which the 
United States government has dealt with 
labor disputes and labor leaders since the 
war. The wholesale arrests and deportations 
of men accused of revolutionary propaganda 
seem to these sympathizers with revolution- 
ary ideals as gross in their violation of liberty 
as the British government's coercion of Ire- 
land. These people believe that American 
democracy has failed in the essential prin- 
ciple which alone justifies democracy, a 
toleration of minorities of opinion and of the 
absolute liberty of the individual within the 
law. They say that even in England there 
is greater liberty, in spite of its mediaeval 

141 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

structure. In Hyde Park on Sundaj'^ morn- 
ing one may hear speeches which would cause 
broken heads and long terms of imprison- 
ment if uttered in New York. Labor, they 
say, would rise in instant and general revolt 
if any of their men were treated with the 
tyranny which befalls labor leaders in the 
United States. 

To my mind a great deal of this criticism 
is due to a misconception of the meaning of 
democracy. In England it was a tradition 
of liberal thought that democracy meant 
not only the right of the people to govern 
themselves, but the right of the individual or 
of any body of men to express their disagree- 
ment with the policy of the state, or with the 
majority opinion, or with any idea which 
annoyed them in any way. But, as we have 
seen by recent history, democratic rule does 
not mean individual liberty. Democracy is 
government by the majority of the people, 
and that majority will be less tolerant of 
dissent than autocracy itself, which can 
often afford to give greater liberty of expres- 
sion to the minority because of its inlierent 
strength. The Russian Soviet government, 
which professes to be the most democratic 
form of government in the world, is utterly 

142 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

intolerant of minorities. I suppose there is 
less individual liberty in Russia than in any 
other country, because disagreement with 
the state opinion is looked upon as treachery 
to the majority rule. So in the United 
States, which is a real democracy, in spite 
of the power of capital, there is less tolera- 
tion of eccentric notions than in England, 
especially when the majority of Americans 
are overwhelmed by a general impulse of 
enthusiasm or passion, such as happened 
when they went into the war. The people 
of the minority are then regarded as enemies 
of the state, traitors to their fellow-citizens, 
and outlaws. They are crushed accordingly 
by the weight of mass opinion, which is 
ruthless and merciless, with more authority 
and power than the decree of a king or the 
law of an aristocratic form of government. 
Although disagreeing to some extent with 
those who criticize the American sense of 
liberty, I do believe that there is a danger in 
the United States of an access of popular 
intolerance, and sudden gusts of popular 
passion, which may sweep the country and 
lead to grave trouble. Being the greatest 
democracy in the world, it is subject to 
the weakness of democracy as well as en- 

143 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

dowed with its strength, and to my mind the 
essential weakness of democracy is due to 
the unsteadiness and feverishness of pubHc 
opinion. When the impulse of public opin- 
ion happens to be right it is the most splendid 
and vital force in the world, and no obstacle 
can stand against it. The idealism of a 
people attains almost supernatural force. 
But if it happens to be wrong it may lead 
to national and world disaster. 

In countries like England public opinion 
is still controlled and checked by a system 
of heavy drag wheels, which is an intolerable 
nuisance when one wants to get moving. 
But that system is very useful when there 
are rocks ahead and the ship of state has to 
steer a careful course. Our constitutional 
monarchy, our hereditary chamber composed 
of men who do not hold their office by popu- 
lar vote, our traditional and old-fashioned 
school of diplomacy, our social castes domi- 
nated by those on top who are conservative 
and cautious because of their possessions 
and privileges, are abominably hindering to 
ardent souls who want quick progress, but 
they are also a national safeguard against 
wild men. The British system of govern- 
ment, and the social structure rising by a 

144 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

series of caste gradations to the topmost 
ranks, are capable of tremendous reforms 
and changes being made gradually, and 
without any violent convulsion or break 
with tradition. 

I am of opinion that this is not so in the 
United States, owing to the greater pressure 
of mass emotion. If, owing to the effects of 
war throughout the world, altering the 
economic conditions of life and the psy- 
chology of peoples, there is a demand for 
radical alteration in the conditions of labor 
within the United States, and for a diff'ercnt 
distribution of wealth (as there is bound to 
be), it is, in the opinion of many observers, 
almost certain tha". these changes will be 
effected after a period of greater violence in 
America than in England. The clash be- 
tween capital and labor, they think, will be 
more direct and more ruthless in its methods 
of conflict on both sides. It will not be 
eased by the numerous differences of social 
class, shading off one into the other, which 
one finds in a less democratic country like 
mine, where the old aristocratic families 
and the country landowning families, below 
the aristocracy, are bound up traditionally 
with the sentiment of the agricultural popu- 

145 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

lation, and where the middle classes in the 
cities are sympathetic on the one hand with 
the just demands of the wage-earning crowd, 
and, on the other hand, by snobbishness, by 
romanticism, by intellectual association, and 
by financial ambitions with the governing, 
and moneyed, regime. 

There are students of life in the United 
States who forecast two possible ways of 
development in the future historj^ of the 
American people. Neither of them is pleas- 
ant to contemplate, and I hope that neither 
is true, but I think there is a shade of truth 
in them, and that they are sufficiently pos- 
sible to be considered seriously as dangers 
ahead. 

The first vision of these minor prophets 
(and gloomy souls) is a social revolution in 
the United States on Bolshevik lines, leading 
through civil strife between the forces of the 
wage-earning classes and the profit-holding 
classes to anarchy as fierce, as wild, and as 
bloody as that in Russia during the Reign 
of Terror. 

They see Fifth Avenue swept by machine- 
gun fire, and its rich shops sacked, and some 
of its skyscrapers rising in monstrous bon- 
fires to lick the sky with flames. 

146 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

They see cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, 
and Cleveland in the hands of revolutionary 
committees of workmen after wild scenes of 
pillage and mob passion. 

They see the rich daughters of million- 
aires stripped of their furs and their pearls 
and roughly handled by hordes of angry 
men, hungry after long strikes and lockouts, 
desperate because of a long and undecided 
warfare with the strong and organized powers 
of law and of capital. 

Their vision is rather hazy about the out- 
come of this imaginary civil war, but of its 
immense, far-reaching anarchy they have no 
doubt, with the certainty that prophets 
have until the progress of history proves 
them to be false. 

Let me say for myself that I do not pose 
as a prophet nor believe this particular 
prophecy in its lurid details. But I do be- 
lieve that there may be considerable social 
strife in the United States for various rea- 
sons. One reason which stares one in the 
face is the immense, flaunting, and dangerous 
luxury of the wealthy classes in cities like 
New York. It is provocative and challeng- 
ing to masses of wage-earners who find 
prices rising against them quicker than their 

147 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

wages rise, and who wish not only for a 
greater share of the proceeds of their labor, 
but also a larger control of the management 
and machinery of labor. The fight, if it 
comes, is just as much for control as for 
profit, and resistance on the part of capital 
will be fierce and ruthless on that point. 

American society — the high caste of mil- 
lionaires and semi-millionaires, and demi- 
semi-millionaires — is perhaps rather careless 
in its display of wealth and in its open mani- 
festations of luxury. The long, unending 
line of automobiles that go crawling down 
Fifth Avenue and rushing down Riverside 
Drive, on any evening of the year, reveal- 
ing women all aglitter with diamonds, with 
priceless furs round their white shoulders, 
in gowns that have cost the year's income of 
a working family, has no parallel in any cap- 
ital of Europe. There is no such pageant of 
wealth in London or Paris. In no capital is 
there such luxury as one finds in New York 
hotels, mansions, and ballrooms. The evi- 
dence of money is overwhelming and oppres- 
sive. The generosity of many of these 
wealthy people, their own simplicity, good 
humor, and charm, are not safeguards against 
the envy and the hatred of those who strug- 

148 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

gle hard for a living wage and for a security 
in life which is harder still to get. 

When I was in America I found a con- 
sciousness of this among the rich people, 
with some of whom I came in touch. They 
were afraid of the future. They saw trouble 
ahead, and they seemed anxious to build 
bridges between the ranks of labor and their 
own class. The wisest among them did not 
adopt the stiff-necked attitude of complete 
hostility to the demands of labor for a more 
equal share of profit and of governance. 
One or two men I met remembered the days 
when they were at the bottom of the ladder, 
and said, "Those fellows are right. . . . I'm 
going half-way to meet them." 

If capital goes anything like half-way, 
there will be no bloody conflict in the United 
States. But there will be revolution, not 
less radical because not violent. That meet- 
ing half-way between capital and labor in the 
United States would be the greatest revolu- 
tion the modern world has seen. 

That, then, is one of the ways in which 
English observers see the future of the United 
States. The other way they suggest would 
be a great calamity for the world. It is the 
way of militarism — a most grisly thought! 

149 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

It is argued by those who take this line of 
prophecy that democracy is no enemy of 
war. On the contrary, they say, a democ- 
racy like that of the United States, virile, 
easily moved to emotion, passionate, sure of 
its strength, jealous of its honor, and quick 
to resent any fancied insult, is more liable 
to catch the war fever than nations con- 
trolled by cautious diplomats and by heredi- 
tary rulers. It is generally believed now 
that the Great War in Europe which ravaged 
so many countries was not made by the 
peoples on either side, and that it did not 
happen until the rival powers on top desired 
it to happen and pressed the buttons and 
spoke the spell-words which called the armies 
to the colors. It is probable, and almost 
certain, that it would not have happened at 
all if the peoples had been left to themselves, 
if the decision of war and peace had been in 
their hands, and if their passions had not 
been artificially roused and educated. But 
that is no argument, some think, against the 
warlike character of strong democracies. 
The ancient Greeks were a great democracy, 
but they were the most ardent warriors of 
their world, and fought for markets, sea 
supremacy, and racial prestige. 

150 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

So some people believe that the United 
States may adopt a philosophy of militarism 
challenging the sea-power of the British 
Empire, by adding Mexico to her dominions, 
and by capturing the strategic points of the 
world's trade routes. They see in the ease 
with which the United States adopted mili- 
tary service in the late war and the rapid, 
efficient way in which an immense army was 
raised and trained a menace to the future of 
the world, because what was done once to 
crush the enemy of France and England may 
be done again if France or England arouse 
the hostility of the American people. The 
intense self-confidence of the Americans, 
their latent contempt of European peoples, 
their quickness to take affront at fancied 
slights worked up by an unscrupulous press, 
their consciousness of the military power that 
was organized but only partially used in the 
recent war, and their growing belief that they 
are a people destined to take and hold the 
leadership of the world, constitute, in the 
opinion of some nervous onlookers, a psy- 
chology which may lead the United States 
into tremendous and terrible adventures. I 
have heard it stated by many people not 
wholly insane that the next world war will 

11 151 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

be mainly a duel between the United States 
and the British Empire. 

They are not wholly insane, the people 
who say these things over the dinner-table 
or in the club smoking-room, yet to my mind 
such opinions verge on insanity. It is of 
course always possible that any nation may 
lose all sense of reason and play the wuld 
beast, as Germany did. It is always possible 
that by some overwhelming popular passion 
any nation may be stricken with w^ar fever. 
But of all nations in the world I think the 
people of the United States are least likely 
to behave in that way, especially after their 
experience in the European war. 

The men who went back were under no il- 
lusions as to the character of modern war- 
fare. They hated it. They had seen its 
devilislmess. They were convinced of its 
idiocy, and in every American home to which 
tliey returned were propagandists against 
war as an argument or as a romance. Apart 
from that, it is almost certain that mili- 
tarism of an aggressive kind is repugnant to 
the tradition and instinct of the American 
people. They have no use for "shining 
armor" and all the old shibboleths of war's 
pomp and pageantry which put a spell on 

152 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

European peoples. The military tradition 
based on the falsity of war's "glory" is not 
in their spirit or in their blood. They will 
fight for the safety of civilization, as it was 
threatened in 1914, for the rescue of ^free 
peoples menaced by brutal destruction, ajid 
they will fight, as all brave people will fight, 
to safeguard their own women and children 
and liberty. 

But I do not believe that the American peo- 
ple will ever indulge in aggressive warfare for 
the sake of imperial ambitions or for world 
domination. Their spirit of adventure finds 
scope in higher ideals, in the victories of 
science and commerce, in the organization of 
every-day life, in the triumph of industry, in 
the development of the natural sources of 
wealth which belong to their great country 
and their ardent individuality. They believe 
in peace, if we may judge by their history 
and tradition, and non-interference with the 
outside world. Their hostility to the peace 
terms and to certain clauses in the League of 
Nations was due to a deep-seated distrust of 
entanglements with foreign troubles, jeal- 
ousies, and rivalries, and the spirit of the 
United States, so far from desiring "man- 
dates" over great populations outside the 

153 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

frontiers of its own people, harked back to 
the old faith in a "splendid isolation" free 
from imperial responsibilities. The people 
were perhaps too cautious and too reserved. 
They risked the chance they had of reshaping 
the structure of human society to a higher 
level of common sense and liberty. They 
made "reservations" which caused the with- 
drawal of their representatives from the 
council-chamber of the Allied nations. But 
that was due not merely, I think, to party 
politics or the passionate rivalry of states- 
men. Truly and instinctively, it was due 
to the desire of the American people to draw 
back to their own frontiers and to work out 
their own destiny in peace, neither inter- 
fering nor being interfered with, according 
to their traditional and popular policy. 

Apart from individual theorists, of the 
"cranky" kind, the main body of intellectual 
opinion in England, as far as I know it, looks 
to the United States as the arbitrator of the 
world's destines and the leader of the world's 
democracies, on peaceful and idealistic lines. 
There is a conviction among many of us — 
not killed by the controversy over the Peace 
Treaty — that the spirit of the American 
people as a whole is guided by an innate 

154 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

common sense free from antiquated spell- 
words, facing the facts of life shrewdly and 
honestly, and leaning always to the side of 
popular liberty against all tyrannies of 
castes, dynasties, and intolerance. Aloof 
from the historical enmities that still divide 
the nations of Europe, yet not aloof in sym- 
pathy with the sufferings, the strivings, and 
the sentiment of those peoples, the United 
States is able to play the part of a recon- 
ciling power, in any league of nations, with 
a detached and disinterested judgment. It 
is above all because it is disinterested that 
Europe has faith and trust in its sense 
of justice. It is not out for empire, for re- 
venge, or for diplomatic vanity. Its people 
are supporters of President Wilson's ideal of 
"open covenants openly arrived at," and of 
the "self-determination of nations," however 
violently they challenge the authority by 
which their President pledged them to defi- 
nite clauses in an unpopular contract. They 
are a friendly and not unfriendly folk in 
their instincts and in their methods. They 
respond quickly and generously to any appeal 
to honest sentiment, though they have no 
patience with hypocrisy. They are realists, 
and hate sham, pose, and falsehood. Give 

155 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

them "a square deal" and they will be 
scrupulous to a high standard of business 
morality. Because of the infusion of foreign 
blood in their democracy which has been 
slowly produced from the great melting-pot 
of nations, they are subject to all the sensi- 
bilities of the human race and not narrowly 
fixed to one racial idea or type of mind. The 
Celt, the Slav, the Saxon, the Teuton, the 
Hebrew, and the Latin strains are present in 
the subconsciousness of the American people, 
so that they are capable of an enormous 
range of sympathy with human nature in 
its struggle upward to the light. They are 
the new People of Destiny in the world of 
progress, because after their early adven- 
tures of youth, their time of preparation, 
their immense turbulent growth, their forging 
of tools, and training of soul, they stand now 
in their full strength and maturity, powerful 
with the power of a great, free, confident 
people. 

To some extent, and I think in an increas- 
ing way, the old* supremacy which Europe 
had is passing westward. Europe is stricken, 
tired, and poor. America is hearty, healthy, 
and rich. Intellectually it is still boyish and 
young and raw. There is the wisdom as well 

156 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

as the sadness of old age in Europe. We 
have more subtlety of brain, more dehcate 
sense of art, a Hterature more expressive of 
the complicated emotions which belong to 
an old heritage of civilization, luxury, and 
philosophy. But I lobk for a Golden Age of 
literature and art in America which shall be 
like our Elizabethan period, fresh and spring- 
like, and rich in vitality and promise. I am 
bound to believe that out of the fusion of 
races in America, and out of their present 
period of wealth and power, and out of this 
new awakening to the problems of life out- 
side their own country, there will come great 
minds, and artists, and leaders of thought, 
surpassing any that have yet revealed them- 
selves. All our reading of history points to 
that evolution. The flowering-time of Amer- 
ica seems due to arrive, after its growing 
pains. 

Be that as it may, it is clear, at least, that 
the destiny of the American people is now 
marked out for the great mission of leading 
the world to a new phase of civilization. By 
the wealth they have, and by their power for 
good or evil, they have a controlling influ- 
ence in the reshaping of the world after its 
convulsions. They cannot escape from that 

157 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

power, even though they shrink from its 
responsibiHty. Their weight throv/n one 
way or the other will turn the scale of all 
the balance of the world's desires. People 
of destiny, they have the choice of arranging 
the fate of many peoples. By their action 
they may plunge the world into strife again 
or settle its peace. They may kill or cure. 
They may be reconcilers or destroyers. 
They may be kind or cruel. It is a terrific 
power for any people to hold. If I were a 
citizen of the United States I should be 
afraid — afraid lest my country should by 
passion, or by ignorance, or by sheer care- 
lessness take the wrong way. 

I think some Americans have that fear. 
I have met some who are anxious and dis- 
tressed. But I think that the majority of 
Americans do not realize the power that has 
come to them nor their new place in the 
world. They have a boisterous sense of im- 
portance and prestige, but rather as a young 
college man is aware of his lustiness and 
vitality without considering the duties and 
the dangers that have come to him with 
manhood. They are inclined to a false 
humility, saying: *'We aren't our brothers' 
keepers, anyway. We needn't go fussing 

158 



WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 

around. Let's keep to our own job and let 
the other people settle their own affairs." 
But meanwhile the other people know that 
American policy, American decisions, the 
American attitude in world problems, will 
either make or mar them. It is essential for 
the safety of the world, and of civilization 
itself, that the United States should realize 
its responsibilities and fulfill the destiny that 
has come to it by the evolution of history. 
To those whom I call the People of Destiny 
I humbly write the words: Let the world 
have peace. 



VI 

AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

IT is only during the war and afterward 
that European people have come to know 
anything in a personal way of the great de- 
mocracy in the United States. Before then 
America was Judged by tourists who came to 
"do" Europe in a few months or a few 
weeks. In France, especially, all of them 
were popularly supposed to be "million- 
aires," or, at least, exceedingly rich. Many 
of them were, and in Paris, to which they 
went in greatest numbers, they were preyed 
upon by hotel managers and shopkeepers, 
and were caricatured in French farces and 
French newspapers as the ^^nouveaux riches'' 
of the world who could afford to buy all the 
luxury of life, but had no refinement of taste 
or delicacy of sentiment. There was an 
enormous ignorance of the education, civiliza- 
tion, and temperament of the great masses of 
people in the United States, and it was an 

ICO 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

absolute belief among the middle classes of 
Europe that the "almighty dollar" was the 
God of America and that there was no other 
worship on that side of the Atlantic. 

This opinion changed in a remarkable way 
during the war and before the United States 
had sent a single soldier to French soil. 
The cause of the change was mainly the im- 
mensely generous, and marvelously efficient, 
campaign of rescue for war-stricken and 
starving people by the American Relief Com- 
mittee under the direction of Mr. Hoover. 

In February of 1915 I left the war zone 
for a little while on a mission to Holland, to 
study the Dutch methods of dealing with 
their enormous problem caused by the in- 
vasion of Belgian refugees. Into one little 
village across the Scheldt 200,000 Belgians 
had come in panic-stricken flight from Ant- 
werp, utterly destitute, and Holland was 
choked with these starving families. But 
their plight was not so bad at that time as 
that of the millions of French and Belgian 
inhabitants who had not escaped by quick 
flight from the advancing tide of war, but had 
been made civil prisoners behind the enemy 
lines. Their rescue was more difficult be- 
cause of the needs of the German army, which 

161 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

requisitioned the produce and the labor of 
the peasants and work-people, so that they 
were cut off from the means of Kfe. The 
United States was quick to understand and 
to act, and in Mr. Hoover it had a man 
able to translate the generous emotion in 
the heart of a great people into practical 
action. I saw him in his offices at Rotter- 
dam, dictating his orders to his staff of 
clerks, and organizing a scheme of relief 
which spread its life-giving influence over 
great tracts of Europe where war had passed. 
My conversation with him was brief, but 
long enough to let me see the masterful char- 
acter, the irresistible energy, the cool, un- 
emotional efficiency of this great business 
man whose brain and soul were in his job. 
It was in the arena of war that I and many 
others saw the result of American generosity. 
After the battles of the Somme, when the 
Germans fell back in a wide retreat under 
the pressure of the British army, many ruined 
villages fell into our hands, and among the 
ruins many French civilians. To this day I 
remember the thrill I had when in some of 
those bombarded places I saw the sign- 
boards of the American Relief over wooden 
shanties where half -starved men and women 

162 



AMERICANS IN EUPOPE 

came to get their weekly rations which had 
come across the sea and by some miracle, 
as it seemed to them, had arrived at their 
village close to the firing-lines. I went into 
those places, some of which had escaped 
from shell-fire, and picked up the tickets for 
flour and candles and the elementary neces- 
sities of life, and read the notices directing 
the people how to take their share of these 
supplies, and thanked God that somewhere 
in the world — away in the United States — 
the spirit of charity was strong to help the 
victims of the cruelty which was devastating 
Europe. 

An immense gratitude for America was in 
the hearts of these French civilians. What- 
ever causes of irritation and annoyance may 
have spoiled the fine flower of the enthu- 
siasm with which France greeted the Ameri- 
can armies when they first landed on her 
coast, and the admiration of the American 
people for France herself, it is certain, I 
think, that in those villages which were en- 
girdled by the barbed wire of the hostile 
armies, and to which the American supplies 
came in days of dire distress, there will be a 
lasting reverence for the name of America, 
which was the fairy godmother of so many 

163 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

women and children. Over and over again 
these women told me of their gratitude. 
"Without the American Relief," they said, 
"we should have starved to death." Others 
said, "The only thing that saved us was the 
weekly distribution of the American sup- 
plies." "There has been no kindness in our 
fate," said one of them, "except the bounty 
of America." 

It is true that into Mr. Hoover's ware- 
houses there flowed great stores of food from 
England, Canada, France, and other coun- 
tries, wdio gave generously, out of their own 
needs, for the sake of those who were in 
greater need, but the largest part of the work 
was America's, and hers was the honor of its 
organization. 

In the face of that noble effort, revealing 
the enormous pity of the United States for 
suffering people, and a careless expenditure 
of that "almighty dollar" which now the 
American people poured into this abyss of 
European distress, it w^as impossible for 
France or England to accuse the United 
States of selfishness or of callousness be- 
cause she still held back from any declara- 
tion of war against our enemies. 

I honestly believe (though I shall not be 

164 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

believed in saying so) that the Americans 
who came over to Europe at this time, in 
the Red Cross or as volunteers, were more 
impatient of that delay of their country's 
purpose than public opinion in England. I 
met many American doctors, nurses. Red 
Cross volunteers, war correspondents, and 
business men, during that long time of wait- 
ing when President Wilson w^as writing his 
series of "Notes," and I could see how 
strained was their patience and how self- 
conscious and apologetic they were because 
their President used arguments instead of 
"direct action." One American friend of 
mine, with whom I often used to walk when 
streams of wounded Tommies were a bloody 
commentary on the everlasting theme of 
war, used to defend Wilson with a chivalrous 
devotion and wealth of argument. "Give 
him time," he used to say. "He is working 
slowly but surely to a definite conviction, 
and when he has made up his mind that there 
is no alternative not all the devils of hell will 
budge him from his course of action. You 
English must be patient with him and with 
all of us." 

"But, my dear old man," I used to say, 

"we are patient. It is you who are impa- 
les 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

tient. There Is no need of all that defensive 
argument. England realizes the difficulty of 
President Wilson and has a profound rever- 
ence for his ideals." 

But my friend used to shake his head 
sadly. 

"You are always guying us," he said. 
"Even at the mess-table your young officers 
fling about the words 'too proud to fight!' 
It makes it very hard for an American among 
you." 

That was true. Our young officers, and 
some of our old ones, liked to "pull the leg" 
of any American who sat at table with them. 
They made jocular remarks about President 
Wilson as a complete letter-writer. That 
unfortunate remark, "too proud to fight," 
was too good to miss by young men with a 
careless sense of humor. It came in with 
devilish appropriateness on all sorts of oc- 
casions, as when a battery of ours fired off a 
consignment of American shells in which 
some failed to explode. 

"They're too proud to fight, sir," said a 
subaltern, addressing the major, and there 
was a roar of laughter which hurt an Ameri- 
can war correspondent in English uniform. 

The English sense of humor remains of 

166 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

schoolboy character among any body of 
young men who dehght in a Httle playful 
*' ragging," and there is no doubt that some 
of us were not sufficiently aware how sensi- 
tive any American was at this time, and how 
a chance word spoken in jest would make his 
nerves jump. 

But I am sure that the main body of Eng- 
lish opinion was not impatient with America 
before she entered the war, but, on the con- 
trary, understood the difficulty of obtaining 
a unanimous spirit over so vast a territory 
in order to have the whole nation behind the 
President. Indeed we exaggerated the dif- 
ferences of opinion in the United States 
and made a bogy of the alien population in 
the great *' melting-pot." It seemed to 
many of us certain that if America declared 
war against Germany there would be civil 
riots and rebellions on a serious scale among 
German -Americans. That thought was al- 
ways in our minds when we justified Wilson's 
philosophical reluctance to draw the sword; 
that and a very general belief among Eng- 
lish "intellectuals" that it would be well to 
have one great nation and democracy out- 
side the arena of conflict, free from the war 
madness that had taken possession of Eu- 

12 167 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

rope, to act as arbitrator if no decision 
could be obtained in the battlefields. It is 
safe to say now that in spite of newspaper 
optimism, engineered by the propaganda 
departments, there were many competent 
observers in the army as well as in the coun- 
try who were led to the belief, after the first 
eighteen months of strife, that the war 
would end in a deadlock and that its con- 
tinuance would only lead to further years of 
mutual extermination. For that reason they 
looked to the American people, under the 
leadership of President Wilson, as the only 
neutral power which could intervene to save 
the civilization of Europe, not by military 
acts, but by a call back to sanity and 
conciliation. 

It was not until the downfall of Russia 
and the approaching menace of an immense 
concentration of German divisions on the 
western front that France and England 
began to look across the Atlantic with 
anxious eyes for military aid. Our immense 
losses and the complete elimination of Russia 
gave the Germans a chance of striking us 
mortal blows before their own man-power 
was exhausted. The vast accession of power 
that would come to us if the United States 

168 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

mobilized her manhood and threw them 
into the scale was realized and coveted by 
our military leaders, but even after America's 
declaration of war the imagination of the 
rank and file in England and France was not 
profoundly stirred by a new hope of support. 
Vaguely we heard of the tremendous whirl- 
wind efforts "over there" to raise and equip 
armies, but there was hardly a man that I 
met who really believed in his soul that he 
would ever hear the tramp of American 
battalions up our old roads of war or see 
the Stars and Stripes fluttering over head- 
quarters in France. Our men knew that at 
the quickest it would take a year to raise 
and train an American army, and in 1917 
the thought of another year of war seemed 
fantastic, incredible, impossible. We be- 
lieved — many of us — that before that year 
had passed the endurance of European 
armies and peoples would be at an end, and 
that in some way or other, by German defeat 
or general exhaustion, peace would come. 
To American people that may seem like 
weakness of soul. In a way it was weakness, 
but justified by the superhuman strain which 
our men had endured so long. Week after 
week, month after month, year after year, 

169 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

they had gone into the fields of massacre, and 
strong battalions had come out with frightful 
losses, to be made up again by new drafts 
and to be reduced again after another spell 
in the trenches or a few hours "over the top." 
It is true they destroyed an equal number of 
Germans, but Germany seemed to have an 
inexhaustible supply of "gun-fodder." Onl}^ 
extreme optimists, and generally those who 
were most ignorant, prophesied an absolute 
smash of the enemy's defensive power. By 
the end of 1917, when the British alone had 
lost 800,000 men in the fields of Flanders, the 
thought that another year still might pass 
before the end of the war seemed too horrible 
to entertain by men who were actually in the 
peril and misery of this conflict. Not even 
then did it seem likely that the Americans 
could be in before the finish. It was only 
when the startling meance of a new German 
offensive, in a last and mighty effort, threat- 
ened our weakened lines that England be- 
came impatient at last for American legions 
and sent out a call across the Atlantic, 
"Come quickly or you will come too late!" 
America was ready. In a year she had 
raised the greatest army in the world by a 
natural energy which was terrific in its con- 

170 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

centration and enthusiasm. We knew that 
if she could get those men across the Atlantic, 
in spite of submarines, the Germans would be 
broken to bits, unless they could break us 
first by a series of rapid blows which would 
outpace the coming of the American troops. 
We did not believe that possible. Even 
when the enemy broke through the British 
lines in March of 1918, with one hundred and 
fourteen divisions to our forty-eight, we did 
not believe they would destroy our armies or 
force us to the coast. Facts showed that our 
belief was right, though it was a touch-and- 
go chance. We held our lines and England 
sent out her last reserves of youth — 300,000 
of them — to fill up our gaps. The Germans 
were stopped at a dead halt, exhausted after 
the immensity of their effort and by prodi- 
gious losses. Behind our lines, and behind the 
French front, there came now a tide of "new 
boys." America was in France, and the doom 
of the German war machine was at hand. 
It would be foolish of me to recapitulate 
the history of the American campaign. The 
people of the United States know what their 
men did in valor and in achievement, and 
Europe has not forgotten their heroism. 
Here I will rather describe as far as I may 

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PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the impressions created in my own mind by 
the first sight of those American soldiers and 
by those I met on the battle-front. 

The very first "bunch" of "Yanks" (as 
we called them) that I met in the field were 
non-combatants who suddenly found them- 
selves in a tight corner. They belonged to 
some sections of engineers who were working 
on light railways in the neighborhood of two 
villages called Gouzeaucourt and Fins, in 
the Cambrai district. On the morning of 
November 30, 1917, I went up very early 
with the idea of going through Gouzeaucourt 
to the front line, three miles ahead, which 
we had just organized after Byng's surprise 
victory of November 20th, when we broke 
through the Hindenburg lines with squadrons 
of tanks, and rounded up thousands of 
prisoners and many guns. As I went through 
Fins toward Gouzeaucourt I was aware of 
some kind of trouble. The men of some 
labor battalions were tramping back in a 
strange, disorganized way, and a number of 
field batteries were falling back. 

"What's up?" I asked, and a young officer 
answered me. 

"The Germans have made a surprise 
attack and broken through." 

172 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

"Where are they?'* I asked again, startled 
by this news. 

He pointed up the road. 

"Just there. . . . Inside Gouzeaucourt." 

The situation was extremely unpleasant. 
The enemy had brought up some field-guns 
and was scattering his fire. It was in a field 
close by that I met the American engineers. 

"I guess this is not in the contract," said 
one of them, grinning. "All the same, if I 
find any Britisher to lend me a rifle I'll get 
a knock at those fellers who spoiled my 
breakfast." 

One man stooped for a petrol tin and put it 
on his head as a shell came howling over us. 

"I guess this makes me look more like you 
other guys," he said, with a glance at our 
steel helmets. 

One tall, loose-limbed, swarthy fellow, who 
looked like a Mexican, but came from Texas, 
as he told me, was spoiling for a fight, and 
with many strange oaths declared his inten- 
tion of going into Gouzeaucourt w^ith the 
first batch of English who w^ould go that way 
with him. They were the Grenadier Guards 
who came up to the counter-attack, munch- 
ing apples, as I remember, when they 
marched toward the enemy. Some of the 

173 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

American engineers joined them and with 
borrowed rifles helped to clear out the en- 
emy's machine-gun nests and recapture the 
ruins of the village. I met some of them the 
following day again, and they told me it 
was a "darned good scrap." They were 
"darned" good men, hard, tough, humorous, 
and full of individual character. 

The general type of young Americans was 
not, however, like these hard-grained men 
of middle age who had led an adventurous 
life before they came to see what war was 
like in Europe. We watched them curiously 
as the first battalions came streaming along 
the old roads of France and Picardy, and 
we were conscious that they were different 
from all the men and all the races behind our 
battle-front. Physically they were splendid 
— those boys of the Twenty-seventh and 
Seventy-seventh Divisions whom we saw 
first of all. They were taller than any of our 
regiments, apart from the Guards, and they 
had a fine, easy swing of body as they came 
marching along. They were better dressed 
than our Tommies, whose rough khaki was 
rather shapeless. There was a dandy cut 
about this American uniform and the cloth 
was of good quality, so that, arriving fresh, 

174 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE' 

thej^ looked wonderfully spruce and neat 
compared with our weatherworn, battle- 
battered lads who had been fighting through 
some hard and dreadful days. But those 
accidental differences did not matter. What 
was more interesting was the physiognomy 
and character of these young men who, by a 
strange chapter of history, had come across 
the wide Atlantic to prove the mettle of 
their race and the power of their nation in 
this world struggle. It came to me, and to 
many other Englishmen, as a revelation that 
there was an American type, distinctive, 
clearly marked off from our own, utterly 
different from the Canadians, Australians, 
and New-Zeal anders, as strongly racial as 
the French or Italians. In whatever uni- 
form those men had been marching one would 
have known them as Americans. Looking 
down a marching column, we saw that it was 
something in the set of the eyes, in the 
character of the cheek-bones, and in the 
facial expression that made them distinctive. 
They had a look of independence and self- 
reliance, and it was as visible as the sun that 
these were men with a sort of national pride 
and personal pride, conscious that behind 
them was a civilization and a power which 

175 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

would give them victory though they in the 
vanguard might die. Those words express 
feebly and foolishly the first impression that 
came to us when the "Yanks" came march- 
ing up the roads of war, but that in a broad 
way was the truth of what we thought. I 
remember one officer of ours summed up 
these ideas as he stood on the edge of the 
road, watching one of those battalions 
passing with their transport. 

"What we are seeing," he said, "is the 
greatest thing that has happened in history 
since the Norman Conquest. It is the ar- 
rival of America in Europe. Those boys are 
coming to fulfill the destiny of a people 
which for three hundred years has been pre- 
paring, building, gro\\ing, for the time when 
it will dominate the world. Those young 
soldiers will make many mistakes. They 
will be mown down in their first attacks. 
They will throw away their lives recklessly, 
because of their freshness and ignorance. 
But behind them are endless waves of other 
men of their own breed and type. Germany 
will be destroyed because her man-power is 
already exhausted, and she cannot resist the 
weight which America will now throw against 
her. But by this victory, which will leave 

176 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

all the old Allies weakened and spent and 
licking their wounds, America will be the 
greatest power in the world, and will hold 
the destiny of mankind in her grasp. Those 
boys slogging through the dust are like the 
Roman legionaries. With them marches 
the fate of the world, of which they are 
masters." 

"A good thing or a bad?" I asked my 
friend. 

He made a circle in the dust with his 
trench stick, and stared into the center of it. 

"Who can tell.'^ " h^ said, presently. "Was 
it good or bad that the Romans conquered 
Europe, or that afterward they fell before 
the barbarians.'* Was it good or bad that 
William and his Normans conquered Eng- 
land.'* . . . There is no good or bad in history; 
there is only change, building-up, and dis- 
integrating, new cycles of energy, decay, and 
rebirth. After this war, which those lads 
will help to win, the power will pass to the 
west, and Europe will fall into the second 
class." 

Those were high views. Thinking less in 
prophecy, getting into touch with the actual 
men, I was struck by the exceptionally high 
level of individual intelligence among the 

177 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

rank and file, and by the general gravity 
among them. The American private soldier 
seemed to me less repressed by discipline 
than our men. He had more original points 
of view, expressed himself with more inde- 
pendence of thought, and had a greater sense 
of his own personal value and dignity. He 
was immensely ignorant of European life 
and conditions, and our Tommies were su- 
perior to him in that respect. Nor had he 
their easy way of comradeship with French 
and Flemish peasants, their whmisical philos- 
ophy of life which enabled them to make a 
joke in the foulest places and conditions. 
They were harder, less sympathetic; in a 
way, I think, less imaginative and spiritual 
than English or French. Thej^ had no tol- 
erance with foreign habits or people. After 
their first look round they had very little use 
for France or the French. The language 
difficulty balked them at the outset and they 
did not trouble much to cope with it, though 
I remember some of the boys sitting under 
the walls of French villages with small chil- 
dren who read out words in conversation- 
books and taught them to pronounce. They 
had a fierce theoretical hatred of the Ger- 
mans, who, they believed, were bad men, in 

178 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

the real old-fashioned style of devil incarnate, 
so that it was up to every American soldier 
to kill Germans in large numbers. It was 
noticeable that after the armistice, when 
the American troops were billeted among 
German civilians, that hatred wore off very 
quickly, as it did with the English Tommies, 
human nature being stronger than war pas- 
sion. Before they had been in the fighting- 
line a week these "new boys" had no il- 
lusions left about the romance or the adven- 
ture of modern war. They hated shell-fire 
as all soldiers hate it, they loathed the 
filth of the trenches, and — they were very 
homesick. 

I remember one private soldier who had 
fought in the American-Spanish war and in 
the Philippines — an old "tough." 

"Three weeks of this war," he said, "is 
equal to three years of all others." 

But he and "the pups," as he called his 
younger comrades, were going to see it 
through, and they were animated by the 
same ideals with which the French and 
British had gone into the war. 

"This is a fight for civilization," said one 
man, and another said, "There'll be no 
liberty in the world if the Germans win." 

179 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

It is natural that many of the boys were 
full of "buck" before they saw the real thing, 
and w^ere rather scornful of the British and 
French troops, who had been such a long 
time "doing nothing," as they said. 

"You've been kidding yourselves that you 
know how to fight," said one of them to an 
English Tommy. "We've come to show 
you! 

That was boys' talk, like our "ragging," 
and was not meant seriously. On the con- 
trary, the companies of the Twenty-seventh 
Division who went into action with the 
Australians at Hamel near Amiens — the 
first time that American troops were in 
action in France — were filled with admira- 
tion for the stolid way in which those veter- 
ans played cards in their dugouts before 
going over the top at dawn. The American 
boys were tense and strained, knowing that 
in a few hours they would be facing death. 
But when the time came they went away 
like greyhounds, and were reckless of fire. 

"They'll go far when they've learned a 
bit," said the Australians. 

They had to learn the usual lessons in the 
same old way, by mistakes, by tragedy, by 
lack of care. They overcrowded their for- 

180 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

ward trenches so that they suffered more 
heavily than they should have done under 
enemy shell-fire. They advanced in the 
open against machine-gun nests and were 
mown down. They went ahead too fast 
without "mopping up" the ground behind 
them, and on the day they helped to break 
the Hindenburg line they did not clear out 
the German dugouts, and the Germans came 
out with their machine-guns and started 
fighting in the rear, so that when the Aus- 
tralians came up in support they had to 
capture the ground again, and lost many 
men before they could get in touch with the 
Americans ahead. For some time the Amer- 
ican transport system broke down, so that 
the fighting troops did not always obtain 
their supplies on the field of battle, and there 
were other errors, inevitable in an army 
starting a great campaign with inexperienced 
staff officers. What never failed was the 
gallantry of the troops, which reached heights 
of desperate valor in the forest of the 
Argonne. 

The officers were tremendously in earnest. 
What struck us most was their gravity. 
Our officers took their responsibility lightly, 
laughed and joked more readily, and had a 

181 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

boyish, whimsical sense of humor. It seemed 
to us, perhaps quite wrongly, that the Ameri- 
can officers were not, on the whole, of a 
merry disposition. They were frank and 
hearty, but as they walked about their bil- 
leting area behind the lines some of them 
looked rather solemn and grim, and our 
young men were nervous of them. I think 
that was simply a matter of facial expression 
plus a pair of spectacles, for on closer ac- 
quaintance one found, invariably, that an 
American officer was a human soul, utterly 
devoid of swank, simple, straight, and de- 
lightfully courteous. Their modesty was at 
times almost painful. They were over- 
anxious to avoid hurting the feelings of 
French or British by any appearance of self- 
conceit. "We don't know a darned thing 
about this war," said many of them, so that 
the phrase became familiar to us. "We 
have come here to learn." 

Well, they learned pretty quickly and 
there were some things they did not need 
teaching — courage, endurance, pride of man- 
hood, pride of race. They were not going to 
let down the Stars and Stripes, though all 
hell was against them. They won a new 
glory for the Star-spangled Banner, and it 

182 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

was the weight they threw in and the valor 
that went with it which, with the French 
and British armies attacking all together, 
under the directing genius of Foch, helped to 
break the German war machine and to 
achieve decisive and supreme victory. 

It would have been better, I think, for 
America and for all of us, especially for 
France, if quickly after victory the American 
troops had gone back again. That was im- 
possible because of holding the Rhine and 
enforcing the terms of peace. But during 
the long time that great bodies of American 
troops remained in France after the day of 
armistice, there was occasion for the bigness 
of ideals and achievements to be whittled 
down by the little nagging annoyances of a 
rather purposeless existence. Boredom, im- 
mense and long enduring, took possession of 
the American army in France. The boys 
wanted to go home, now that the job was 
done. They wanted the victory march down 
Fifth Avenue, not the lounging life in little 
French villages, nor even the hectic gayeties 
of leave in Paris. Old French chateaux 
used as temporary headquarters suffered 
from successive waves of occupation by 
oflScers who proceeded to modernize their 

13 183 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

surroundings by plugging old panels for 
electric light and fixing up telephone-wires 
through painted ceilings, to the horror of the 
concierges and the scandal of the neighbor- 
hood. In the restaurants and hotels and 
cinema halls the Americans trooped in, took 
possession of all the tables, shouted at the 
waiters who did not seem to know their 
jobs, and expressed strong views in loud 
voices (understood by French civilians who 
had learned English in the war) about the 
miserable quality of French food and the 
darned arrogance of French officers. It was 
all natural and inevitable — but unfortunate. 
The French were too quick to forget after 
armistice that they owed a good deal to 
American troops for the complete defeat of 
Germany. The Americans were not cj[uite 
careful in remembering the susceptibilities 
of a sensitive people. So there were disil- 
lusion and irritation on both sides, in a broad 
and general way, allowing for many in- 
dividual friendships between French and 
Americans, many charming memories which 
will remain on both sides of the Atlantic 
when the war is old in history. 

Americans who overcame the language 
difficulty by learning enough to exchange 

184 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

views with the French inhabitants — and 
there were many — were able to overlook the 
minor, petty things which divided the two 
races, and were charmed with the intelli- 
gence, spirit, and humor of the French bour- 
geoisie and educated classes. They got the 
best out of France, and were enchanted with 
French cathedrals, mediaeval towns, picture- 
galleries, and life. Paris caught hold of 
them, as it takes hold of all men and women 
who know something of its history and learn 
to know and love its people. Thousands of 
American officers came to know Paris in- 
timately, from Montmartre to Montparnasse, 
became familiar and welcome friends in little 
restaurants tucked away in the side-streets, 
where they exchanged badinage with the 
proprietor and the waitresses, and felt the 
spirit of Paris creep into their bones and 
souls. Along the Grands Boulevards these 
young men from America watched the pag- 
eant of life pass by as they sat outside the 
cafes, studying the little high-heeled ladies 
who passed by with a side-glance at these 
young men, marveling at the strange medley 
of uniforms, as French, English, Australian, 
New Zealand, Canadian, Italian, Portu- 
guese, and African soldiers went by, realizing 

185 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

the meaning of "Europe" with all its races 
and rivalries and national traditions, and 
getting to know the inside of European 
politics by conversations with men who 
spoke with expert knowledge about this con- 
glomeration of peoples. Those young men 
who are now back in the United States 
have already made a difference to their 
country's intellectual outlook. They have 
taught America to look out upon the world 
with wider vision and to abandon the old iso- 
lation of American thought which was apt to 
ignore the rest of the human family and re- 
main self-contained and aloof from a world 
policy. 

During the months that followed the 
armistice many Americans of high intel- 
lectual standing came to Europe, attracted 
by the great drama and business of the 
Peace Conference, and to prepare the way 
for the reconstruction of civilization after 
the years of conflict. They were states- 
men, bankers, lawyers, writers, and finan- 
ciers. I met some of them in Paris, Rome, 
Vienna, London, and other cities of Europe. 
They were the onlookers and the critics of 
the new conflict that had followed the old, 
the conflict of ideas, policy, and passion 

186 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

which raged outside the quiet chamber at 
Versailles, where President Wilson, Lloyd 
George, Clemenceau, and a few less im- 
portant mortals were redrawing the frontiers 
of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. 
From the first, many of these men were frank 
in private conversation about the hostility 
that was growing up in the United States 
against President Wilson, and the distrust of 
the American people in a league of nations 
which might involve the United States in 
European entanglements alien to her inter- 
ests and without the consent of her people. 
At the same time, and at that time when 
there still seemed to be a chance of arriving 
at a new compact between nations which 
would eliminate the necessity of world-wide 
war, and of washing out the blood-stains of 
strife by new springs of human tolerance 
and international common sense, these Amer- 
ican visitors did not throw down the general 
scheme for a league of nations, and looked 
to the Peace Conference to put forward a 
treaty which might at least embody the 
general aspirations of stricken peoples. Grad- 
ually these onlookers sickened with disgust. 
They sickened at the interminable delays in 
the work of the Conference, and the imperi- 

187 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

alistic ambitions of the Allied powers, and 
the greedy rivalries of the little nations, at 
all the falsity of lip-service to high principles 
while hatred, vengeance, injustice, and sor- 
did interests were in the spirit of that docu- 
ment which might have been the new Charter 
of Rights for the peoples of the world. 
They saw that Clemenceau's vision of peace 
was limited to the immediate degradation 
and ruin of the Central Powers, and that he 
did not care for safeguarding the future or 
for giving liberty and justice and a chance of 
economic life to democracies liberated from 
military serfdom. They saw that Lloyd 
George was shifting his ground continually 
as pressure was brought to bear on him now 
from one side of the Cabinet and now from 
the other, so that his policy was a strange 
compound of extreme imperialism and demo- 
cratic idealism, with the imperialist ambition 
winning most of the time. They saw that 
Wilson was being hoodwinked by the sub- 
tlety of diplomatists who played on his 
vanity, and paid homage to his ideals, and 
made a prologue of his principles to a drama 
of injustice. Our American visitors were 
perplexed and distressed. They had desired 
to be heart and soul with the Allies in the 

188 



( 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

settlement of peace. They still cherished 
the ideals which had uplifted them in the 
early days of the war. They were resolved 
that the United States should not play a 
selfish part in the settlement or profit by 
the distress of nations who had been hard 
hit. But gradually they became disillu- 
sioned with the statecraft of Europe, and 
disappointed with the low level of intelli- 
gence and ^morality reflected in the news- 
paper press of Europe, which still wrote in 
the old strain of "propaganda" when insin- 
cerity and manufactured falsehood took the 
place of truth. They hardened visibly, I 
think, against the view that the United 
States should be pledged by Wilson to the 
political and economic schemes of the big 
powers in Europe, which, far from healing 
the wounds of the world, kept them raw and 
bleeding, while arranging, not deliberately, 
but very certainly, for future strife into 
which America would be dragged against 
her will. England and France failed to see 
the American point of view, which seems to 
me reasonable and sound. 

The generous way in which the United 
States came to the rescue of starving peoples 
in the early days of the war was not deserted 

189 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

by her when the armistice and the peace 
that followed revealed the frightful distress 
in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. \^hile 
the doom of these people was being pro- 
nounced by statesmen not naturally cruel, 
but nevertheless sentencing great popula- 
tions to starvation, and while the blockade 
was still in force, American representatives 
of a higher law than that of vengeance went 
into these ruined countries and organized 
relief on a great scale for suffering childhood 
and despairing womanhood. I saw the 
work of the American Relief Committee in 
Vienna and remember it as one of the noblest 
achievements I have seen. All ancient en- 
mity, all demands for punishment or repara- 
tion, went down before the agony of Austria. 
Vienna, a city of two and a half million souls, 
once the capital of a great empire, for cen- 
turies a rendezvous of gayety and genius, 
the greatest school of medicine in the world, 
the birthplace and home of many great mu- 
sicians, and the dwelling-place of a happy, 
careless, and luxurious people, was now de- 
livered over to beggary and lingering death. 
With all its provinces amputated so that it 
was cut off from its old natural resources of 
food and raw material, it had no means of 

190 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

livelihood and no hope. Austrian paper 
money had fallen away to m^re trash. The 
krone tumbled down to the value of a cent, 
and it needed many kronen to buy any 
article of life — 2,000 for a suit of clothes, 
800 for a pair of boots, 25 for the smallest 
piece of meat in any restaurant. Middle- 
class people lived almost exclusively on cab- 
bage soup, with now and then potatoes. A 
young doctor I met had a salary of 60 kronen 
a week. When 1 asked him how he lived 
he said: "I don't. This is not life." The 
situation goes into a nutshell when I say — 
as an actual fact — that the combined salaries 
of the Austrian Cabinet amounted, according 
to the rate of exchange, to the wages of three 
old women who look after the lavatories in 
Lucerne. Many people, once rich, lived on 
bundles of paper money which they flung 
away as leaves are scattered from autumn 
trees. They were the lucky ones, though 
ruin stared them in the eyes. By smuggling, 
which became an open and acknowledged 
system, they could afford to pay the ever- 
mounting prices of the peasants for at least 
enough food to keep themselves alive. But 
the working-classes, who did not work be- 
cause factories w^ere closed for lack of coal 

191 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

and raw material, just starved, keeping the 
flame of life aflicker by a thin and miserable 
diet, until the weakest died. Eighty-three 
per cent, of the children had rickets in an 
advanced stage. Children of three and four 
had never sat up or walked. Thousands of 
children were just living skeletons, with 
gaunt cheek-bones and bloodless lips. They 
padded after one in the street, like little old 
monkeys, holding out their claws for alms. 
The American Relief Committee got to 
work in the early months of 1919. They 
brought truck-loads of food to Vienna, 
established distributing centers and feeding 
centers in old Viennese palaces, and when I 
was there in the early autumn the}^ were 
giving 200,000 children a meal a day. I 
went round these places with a young 
American naval officer — Lieutenant Stock- 
ton — one of the leading organizers of relief, 
and I remember him as one of the best types 
of manhood I have ever met up and down the 
roads of life. His soul was in his job, but 
there was nothing sloppy about his senti- 
ment or his system. He was a master of 
organization and details and had established 
the machinery of relief, with Austrian ladies 
doing the drudgery with splendid devotion 

192 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

(as he told me, and as I saw), so that it was 
in perfect working order. As a picture of 
childhood receiving rescue from the agony of 
hunger, I remember nothing so moving nor 
so tragic as one of those scenes when I saw 
a thousand children sitting down to the meal 
that came from America. Here before them 
in that bowl of soup was life and warmth. 
In their eyes there was the light of ecstasy, 
the spiritual gratitude of children for the 
joy that had come after pain. For a little 
while they had been reprieved from the 
hunger-death. 

American agents of the Y. M. C. A., 
nurses, members of American missions and 
philanthropic societies, penetra«ted Europe 
in far and strange places. I met a crowd of 
them on the *' Entente train" from Vienna 
to Paris, and in various Italian towns. 
They were all people with shrewd, observant 
eyes, a quiet sense of humor, and a repug- 
nance to be "fudged off" from actual facts 
by any humbug of theorists. They studied 
the economic conditions of the countries 
through which they traveled, studied poverty 
by personal visits to slum areas and working- 
class homes, and did not put on colored spec- 
tacles to stare at the life in which they found 

193 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

themselves. The American girls were as 
frank and courageous as the men in their 
facing of naked truth, and they had no false 
prudery or sentimental shrinking from the 
spectacle of pain and misery. Their greatest 
drawback was an ignorance of foreign lan- 
guages, which prevented many of them from 
getting more than superficial views of na- 
tional psychology, and I think many of 
them suffered from the defect of admirable 
qualities by a humorous contempt of foreign 
habits and ideas. That did -not make them 
popular with people whom they were not 
directly helping. Their hearty laughter, 
their bunching together in groups in which 
conversation was apt to become noisy, and 
their cheerful disregard of conventionality in 
places where Europeans were on their "best 
behavior" had an irritating effect at times 
upon foreign observers, who said: "Those 
Americans have not learned good manners. 
They are the new barbarians in Europe." 
English people, traveling as tourists before 
the war, were accused of the same lack of 
respect and courtesy, and were unpopular 
for the same reason. 

Toward the end of 1919 and in the begin- 
ning of 1920 I came into touch with a number 

194 



AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

of Americans who came to Europe on 
business enterprises or to visit the battle- 
fields. In private conversation they did not 
disguise their sense of distress that there 
were strained relations between the public 
opinion of England and America. Several of 
them asked me if it were true that England 
was as hostile to America as the newspapers 
tried to make out. By way of answer I asked 
them whether America were as hostile to us 
as the newspapers asked us to believe. They 
admitted at once that this was a just and 
illuminating reply, because the intelligent 
section of American society — ^people of de- 
cent education and good will — was far from 
being hostile to England, but on the con- 
trary believed firmly that the safety and hap- 
piness of the world depended a good deal 
upon Anglo-American friendship. It was 
true that the average citizen of the United 
States, even if he were uninfluenced by Irish- 
Ajnerican propaganda, believed that England 
was treating Ireland stupidly and unjustly — 
to which I answered that the majority of 
English people agreed with that view, though 
realizing the difficulty of satisfying Ireland 
by any measure short of absolute indepen- 
dence and separation. It was also true, 

195 



PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

they told me, that there was a general sus- 
picion in the United States that England 
haci paade a big grab in the peace terms for 
imperial aggrandizement, masked under the 
high-sounding name of "mandate" for the 
protection of African and Oriental states. 
My reply to that, not as a political argument, 
but as simple sincerity, was the necessity of 
some control of such states, if the power of 
the Turk were to be abolished from his old 
strongholds, and a claim for the British 
tradition as an administrator of native races ; 
but I added another statement which my 
American friends found it hard to believe, 
though it is the absolute truth, as nine Eng- 
lishmen out of ten will affirm. So far from 
desiring an extension of our empire, the vast 
•and overwhelming majority of British people, 
not only in England, but in our dominions 
beyond the seas, are aghast at the new re- 
sponsibilities which we have undertaken, 
and would relinquish many of them, espe- 
cially in Asia, with a sense of profound relief. 
We have been saddled with new and perilous 
burdens by the ambition of certain statesmen 
who have earned the bitter animosity of the 
great body of the British people entirely out 
of sympathy with their imperialistic ideals,. 

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AMERICANS IN EUROPE 

I have not encountered a single American 
in Europe who has not expressed, with what I 
beheve is absolute sincerity, a friendly and 
affectionate regard for England, whose people 
and whose ways of life they like, and whose 
language, literature, and ideals belong to our 
united civilization. They have not found in 
England any of that hostility which they 
were told to expect, apart from a few black- 
guardly articles in low-class journals. On 
the contrary, they have found a friendly 
folk, grateful for their help in the war, full 
of admiration for American methods, and 
welcoming them to our little old island. 

They have gone back to the United States 
with the conviction, which I share, with all 
my soul, that commercial rivalry, political 
differences, and minor irritations, inevitable 
between two progressive peoples of strong 
character, must never be allowed to divide 
our two nations, who fundamentally belong 
to the same type of civilization and to the 
same code of principles. Most of the so- 
called hostility between us is the mere froth 
of foul-mouthed men on both sides, and the 
rest of it is due to the ignorance of the masses. 
We must get to know each other, as the 
Americans in Europe have learned to know 

197 



/ 

PEOPLE OF DESTINY 

us and to like us, and as all of us who have 
crossed the Atlantic the other way about 
have learned to know and like the American 
people. For the sake of the future of the 
world and all the hopes of humanity we must 
get to the heart of each other and establish 
a lasting and unbreakable friendship. It is 
only folly that will prevent us. 



THE END 



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